Ultimate Sonic
by Gigazubyte
Summary: War erupts in the South Islands when benevolent Dr. Robotnik reveals his true colors. Little does anyone suspect the cobalt hedgehog who stands up to the madman will become Mobius' greatest hero. This may be their first battle, but it won't be the last.
1. Chapter 1

Author's Note:

Hi, welcome to Ultimate Sonic. This is my retelling of Sonic, beginning with a cross between the original game and SegaSonic Arcade, and going... well I'll leave that blank for now. Anyway, it's primarily inspired by the game canon, but with heavy influences from other Sonic canons as well. Beyond that, there will naturally be a lot of characters of my own creation, primarily antagonists and background characters added for flavor, but I can't promise the spotlight will be on the usual heroes 100 of the time. Also, I'd like to thank Thrippa for graciously allowing me to use the term dokan for Sonic and the others of his kind, since anthropomorph really is an unwieldy term.

Sonic the Hedgehog reclined on his temporary bed in Dr. Robotnik's medical lab, one sneakered foot tapping against the wall in rapid time to the music blaring from the headphones perched on his ears. His brilliant blue fur ruffled in the breeze produced by the air conditioning unit. He opened one eye as a loud booming made itself heard over the music.

"One sec!" he called, vaulting out of bed and stepping over to the door of his room in less time than it took most people to blink.

"Geez, Mighty," He continued, as the door slid open with a slight hiss to reveal the red and black armadillo on the other side "You don't have to beat the door down to get my attention. Hey Ray, what's up?" Sonic asked, addressing the golden furred flying squirrel standing close behind Mighty, as if to hide in his shadow.

"Sonic," Mighty said slowly, "We want to talk to you."

"Okay, what about?" Sonic asked, cocking his head to one side and scratching his ear.

"About leaving. Don't you think it's time to go home?"

"Are you kidding?" Sonic grinned, "How can you not like it here? The digs are nice, the fridge is stocked. We get to play on the obstacle courses the Doc builds, and when we're not working with him we get to do whatever we want. He even made me new shoes. Did you see these things? Awesome, right?"

"Yeah," said Mighty quietly, "We get to do whatever we want, except leave the island to go see our friends."

Sonic's smile faltered slightly. "You really mean it, huh?"

"Maybe it's different for you," Mighty said, "You don't have a family to go back too, and you actually enjoy your speed. I don't like being a freak."

"You're not a freak," Ray said in a voice just above a whisper, "You're… special."

"Two different ways of saying the same thing, Ray," Mighty replied, "I'm different, and people notice. I hate being the center of attention."

"Well alright then," Sonic said, grinning again, "let's call up the boss man and ask for a boat. We can use my phone."

"Sonic, wait!" Mighty said as Sonic skipped over to the video phone console and started punching buttons.

"Why?" Sonic asked, looking over his shoulder, a finger hovering over the last button.

"I don't think it's that easy…" Mighty said, glancing around nervously, "That's why we came to talk to you. We were planning on… sneaking out. Escaping."

"What are you talking about? He gives me whatever I ask for."

Mighty shook his head, "I don't think he'll just let us go."

"Sure he will, I'm like his favorite." Sonic said, punching the final button.

The screen flickered on. Dr. Robotnik sat facing away from the camera, watching another screen on the other side of the room intently, only the very edge of which was visible around the bulk of his body. An odd high pitched shrieking sounded intermittently in the background. Then Robotnik shifted, and over his shoulder Sonic could see a line of angular figures marching on a crowd of dokan shaped shadows. There was a flash of light, and Sonic recognized one of the figures as it was briefly illuminated. Amadeus Prower, the retired general, leading a charge against a group of robots. Robotnik shifted back to his original position and the view was lost again.

"Uh, hey Doc, whatcha watching?" Sonic asked, keeping his voice even but not quite managing to sound nonchalant.

"Ah, er, Sonic! Robotnik said, spinning around and positioning himself even more firmly in front of the other screen. "Nothing much, just…" He seemed to grope for words for a moment, and then his face fell into an easy, practiced smile that did not quite reach his eyes, white teeth gleaming under the bristling mustache. "Some old war documentaries. That's all." He reached behind him a pressed a button. The other screen went dark and silent.

"I see…" Sonic said, glancing over his shoulder at Mighty and Ray.

"Was there something you wanted to talk to me about?"

"Ah, yeah, actually. My buddies Ray and Mighty are really homesick. Can you get us a boat so they can go see their families?"

"I'm afraid that's not possible at this time, Sonic."

"What about tomorrow then?" The smile faltered ever so slightly.

"I don't think so. It might be, but I make no promises."

"Sometime this week?"

"I certainly hope so, but I can't be sure."

"We're kinda in a hurry. What's the holdup, Doc?"

"All my boats are…" there was the pause again, and then the smile, "Out on oceanographic survey duty."

"Okay then," Sonic said, yawning loudly and stretching his arms, "In that case, I'm gonna go to bed. I'll talk to you in the morning, I guess."

"Goodnight Sonic. Could you ask Mighty and Ray to return to their respective rooms please?"

"Sure thing. 'night, Doc." He turned off videophone and turned around to face Mighty and Ray. "You guys catch all of that?"

"Yeah…" Mighty said.

"Good. Follow me." Sonic replied, stepping out into the hall.

"What?" Where are you going?" Mighty asked.

"We're going for a walk." Sonic replied with a grin, emphasizing the plural.

Sonic had just keyed open the first door at the end of the hall when Robotnik's disembodied voice rang out over the loudspeakers.

"Sonic, Mighty, Ray! Where are you three going?"

"Oh," Sonic replied, grinning cheekily, "I changed my mind about going to bed. Thought we'd go for a walk instead."

"This really isn't the best time for that. I'm afraid I must insist you return to your rooms. You can go out tomorrow."

"Sorry Doc, but we need to get out of here, now." Sonic stepped through the door; Mighty and Ray close on his heels. The viewscreen in this small hub room flickered on, and an enraged Robotnik stared down at them from his place on the wall.

"Return to your rooms immediately! That is an imperative!" Robotnik shouted, his easy-going façade shattering. There was an edge of something else in that voice, beyond the anger. It sounded almost like… panic?

"No." Sonic's voice was cold and hard as he in turn dropped his playful attitude to match Robotnik's glare with one of his own.

Robotnik spluttered in incoherent rage for a moment before regaining his composure. "Very well, if you're determined to ignore my reasonable requests, I suppose I have no choice." The doors on each of the room's four walls slammed shut, clicking as the electronic locks engaged. "Just sit tight," Robotnik chuckled, "An escort will arrive momentarily to return you to your rooms. We'll talk about this in the morning, when you've had time to cool your heels and reflect on your insubordinate actions." The viewscreen went blank. Sonic tried to open the door they had just come through, but the lock refused to accept his override code.

"W-W-What're we gonna do?" Ray asked in a hysterical, stuttering wail.

"Chill, Ray," Sonic replied, grinning thoughtfully, "Mighty, you think you can handle that door?" He asked, jerking a thumb in the direction of the door opposite the one they had entered from.

"Y-yeah." Mighty nodded determinedly and strode over to the heavy metal door, some four inches of steel alloy, and let loose with a punch that shook the room. The door groaned and buckled under the blow. Two more devastating punches bent door and doorframe enough for Mighty to get his fingers in the gaps where the door had curled back and the frame had pulled loose from the wall. He heaved, and the entire conglomeration pulled free on one side, leaving a hole large enough to squeeze through. He gave the door another brutal yank, wrenching it free of the wall on the other side with a hideous metallic screech. He hefted the massive, warped hunk of metal and threw it at the viewscreen, which shattered and crashed to the floor in a shower of sparks.

"Nice!" Sonic whistled appreciatively, stepping through the doorframe. A set of golden rings glittered on the far side, spinning in place. Sonic picked one up and twirled it between his fingers before it disappeared into his hand.

"Is it just me, or are there way more of these things lately?" he asked as they ran down the hallway, feet clanging on the polished metal floors.

"I think there are more of them. It seems like they started showing up after Robotnik did that thing with the emerald," Mighty said, pacing himself so that Ray could keep up. Sonic did likewise as they dashed through the branching corridors and the rooms that they connected. The base was huge in comparison to the buildings they were used to, but only a few rooms and around a thousand yards of hallway separated them from the big hangar that marked the last barrier between themselves and the outside world. Mighty dealt with each locked door in similar fashion, ignoring the increasing pitch and decibel of Robotnik's outraged commands to stop.

Surprisingly, the final door was unlocked, hissing open before Mighty had a chance to pound on it, which was just as well, seeing as he was suffering from a bad case of bruised knuckles already. Sonic eyed the dark beyond the door warily, looked at Mighty and Ray, then shrugged his shoulders and stepped through. It was difficult to see in the hangar, since only the blue green emergency lighting strips were active, a sharp contrast to the brightly, if harshly, lit halls.

"Uh…" Sonic said, as his eyes adjusted, and he noticed a myriad of other, smaller lights, lights that blinked from the faces and torsos of angular, unfeeling figures. "Uh-oh." He said, hearing the click of weapons being leveled in his direction. From experience Sonic knew that the stun weapons Robotnik had him practice against in the training room could be quite painful. And these might not be meant to stun.

"Ray! Get down!" Mighty yelled, shoving his friend behind a stack of crates in the corner of the room. It was quite a shove, as the crates were fifteen feet away. Ray bounced on the floor before rolling into the sheltered position. He whimpered, more in fear than pain. Mighty bellowed with rage as a shot struck his shoulder, and charged. Sonic was already in fluid motion, and in the process of smashing his third robot, having bounced off the crushed heads of the previous two. Mighty ran straight into the middle of the fray, destroying one robot with a thunderous punch, and ripping the arm off a second. He used the arm as a club to down the same robot he'd torn it from and hurled it at a third.

"Mighty!" Sonic shouted, dodging the hail of fire that trained on him, "Forget the 'bots! Get the door open so we can get out of here!" Mighty nodded. "I'll distract them," Sonic added.

Mighty slammed his way through the rows of robots between him and the small auxiliary door at the far side of the room. The massive steel shutter that served as the main door was beyond even his strength to open quickly. He reached the smaller door and began hammering on it with incredible force, ignoring the shots that pounded his shell from behind. Though smaller than the main door, as it was meant to admit only a few human sized figures at any one time, the auxiliary entrance was considerably more durable than the doors in the inner sanctum and capable of sustaining quite a beating. Sonic did his best to distract or destroy the robots that were firing on Mighty while staying one step ahead of the ones that were targeting him, bouncing his way around the huge room with unparalleled speed. Finally, the door gave way with a tremendous groan, and Mighty shoved it outward.

"Sonic! Get Ray!" he shouted, and stepped through the hole he had made in the wall.

"On it!" Sonic called, dodging another fusillade of shots and scrapping two more bots in his counter attack. He dodged around the remainder, moving erratically and so fast that he was always several feet ahead of the following fire, vaulted over the crates, and slid toward where Ray crouched, scooping him up and regaining his feet in one fluid motion.

"Hold tight." Sonic said grimly, "I've never tried this with somebody in my arms before."

There were too many robots between Sonic and the exit, so he ran up the wall and then perpendicular to the ground at a height of about eight feet, passing scant feet above them while they fired futilely. It proved awkward but not impossible to do while encumbered. Ray's weight was not a problem in and of itself so much. Like all Dokan, Sonic was strong enough to carry an adult human without difficulty, even for an extended period of time, but it did mess with his sense of balance. Once he was clear of the robots, Sonic jumped off the wall and sped out the door. A hail of laser fire followed him into the cool night air, and some of it crackled as it impacted the warped doorframe.

Mighty was waiting for them just outside. He breathed a sigh of relief as Sonic skidded to a halt beside him and put Ray down.

"C'mon guys," Sonic said, "Something tells me we shouldn't stick around. I don't think the welcoming committee is quite done with us."

"Yeah," Mighty said, pausing in his attempts to comfort the sniffling Ray, "Here they come now."

A horde of robots had begun arriving, some pouring out the door, but far more circling around the building, adding greatly to the ranks. If it had just been the remainder from the hangar Sonic and Mighty could conceivably simply have scrapped them, but that had only been a fraction of Robotnik's forces and it looked like he was calling in the rest, maybe even emptying the entire base. Furthermore, sleek, insectoid shapes began flitting across the moon with increasing frequency. Sonic had only fought them once or twice before, but he recognized Robotnik's buzzbomber drones. There were already a lot of things pointing lasers in their direction, some of which were firing, and more were coming every second. The three turned and ran into the moonlit jungle.

Although the moon was high in the sky and nearly full and the stars shown clearly in the cloudless sky, navigating the jungle at night was difficult. Mighty and Ray found themselves tripping over roots far too frequently. Sonic's uncanny agility kept him consistently upright, but even he found the going slow and arduous. The humanoid robots didn't pursue them, as they weren't advanced enough to navigate the difficult terrain. However, the buzzbombers were not thusly hindered, and promptly gave chase. Sonic circled back to wreck the first several pairs that got too close before rejoining Mighty and Ray. He repeated the pattern until the buzzbombers pulled back, too high to reach, even with the boost that launching of the trunk of a palm tree afforded. The benefit to their being out of reach was that the bombers could only attack when there was a break in the canopy, which meant that they were only under fire at intervals, and predictable intervals at that. Golden rings appeared in quantity along the jungle paths. For some reasons they never seemed to show up one at a time, but always in some sort of group formation. The three wasted little time pondering this mystery though, and gratefully scooped up every ring they found, enjoying the slight energy boost that came with each one.

As they skirted a particularly large clearing, Mighty picked up a good sized stone from the jungle floor. After a second's pause to judge the angle, he whipped his arm around with incredible force, hurling the stone faster than the unaided human eye could follow. One of the bombers simply dropped out of the sky. Without any more stones to hand, Mighty snapped a good sized limb off the tree above him and threw it like a makeshift javelin. The limb wasn't perfectly straight, and because of this it went wide of the intended target, but it still clipped another buzzbomber, which began listing crazily as the damaged engine provided power in erratic spurts.

A storm of laser fire forced them to retreat from the tree line before Mighty could throw anything else. Sonic began leading them towards the dock they had arrived at two weeks earlier. At first they had just been getting away from the base, but now he wanted to get off the island entirely. Robotnik had said there were no boats, but he seemed to be lying the entire time, which was what had made Sonic so determined to leave in the first place. The doctor had seemed nice enough at first, if a little odd, but after Sonic had seen the view in the screen over his shoulder some of his quirky behavior had taken a much more sinister cast, particularly his insistence that they stay in or near the base all the time. Sonic did not care for being lied to, and he detested being ordered around. He wondered what else the doctor had lied about. Everything? What if he had even been responsible for the fever that brought everyone in to see him in the first place? Sonic didn't see how he could be, but it did seem awfully convenient when he thought about it.

"Hey Mighty," he said, initiating some banter to cover his distraction, "Why do you think he makes those stupid buzzbombers look like bees?"

"I don't know," Mighty said, "To make them look natural, maybe? And I think they're supposed to be wasps anyway."

"Pssh, I don't know who he thinks he's fooling if that's it. They're way too big to pass for real bees."

"I t-t-think they're supposed to be s-scary," Ray said, "I'd be scared of a wasp that big."

"I'd swat it for you," Mighty said quietly, comfortingly.

"T-thanks."

By that point they had nearly reached the tree line. Mighty grabbed Sonic by the shoulder and spun him around, putting a finger to his lips for quiet.

"What?" Sonic asked in an annoyed whisper.

"We're almost to the beach," Mighty responded.

"So?"

"So that's a big open place with no trees. We can't just go rushing out there. There are too many buzzbombers above, can't you hear them?"

"They can't hit me, I'm too fast."

"You may be, but Ray and I aren't. They don't knock me out like they're supposed to, but that doesn't mean they don't hurt, and Ray doesn't have my kind of endurance. Secondly," he said, stifling whatever objections Sonic might have been about to raise with a hand gesture, "what about the boats? If we find one, how long is it going to take to learn to drive it? How fast do they go? Fast enough to out run these things?"

"Okay, I see your point, but what do you want me to do about it?"

"We've got to get rid of the bombers. Any ideas?"

"Let me think… yeah. See if you can find some more rocks, for starters."

"That's the plan?" Mighty asked skeptically.

"I'm working on it!" Sonic said angrily, "Look, I'll try to lead them off, distract as many as I can. I'll run down the beach, I'm not worried about them tagging me. Just tell me how long you think you need to get a boat started, and I'll meet you there. Yeah, I'm pretty sure I can see at least one. If I'm wrong, we can meet back here and think of another plan."

"Okay," Mighty said, "That sounds as good as anything I can come up with. I'd like to break as many of those things as I can before we start, though, but I'm afraid if I draw attention to myself they won't follow you."

"I have an idea," Sonic said, grinning wickedly, "Can you pull this down?" He asked, leading Mighty to a small palm tree wrapped with vines covered in bright flowers of pink and yellow and purple. Mighty grabbed it by the trunk as high as he could reach. The thin tree groaned in protest, but Mighty walked it down hand over hand until the leaves were nearly touching the ground. The tree strained as though it were about to snap, which it probably was. Sonic jumped on, positioning himself just below where the leaves began.

"Sonic?" Mighty asked, puzzled and a little worried that his friend had snapped, "What are you doing?"

"Trust me, this will work, I think. Just let go when I tell you. I'll meet you back here in ten."

"Better make it fifteen," Mighty said.

"Sure," Sonic replied, watching the sky with probing eyes until a sleek black silhouette passed in front of him.

"Now!" he shouted. Mighty released the tree, which sprang back to its original position, launching Sonic upward as it did so. He curled into a protective ball just before impact with the buzzbomber, which never had a prayer of coming out the victor in a collision like that. By lucky chance one of the fusillade of coconuts that was also launched took down a second buzzbomber, and Sonic twisted in midair to strike another on his way back to earth. He bounced down from the second bomber and landed lightly in the sand, and was off again immediately.

"Come and get me, buzzbrains!" he yelled, racing down the beach fast enough to outdistance them but not so fast as to lose them completely, kicking up sand as he went. He hoped whatever primitive intelligence they had would be duped by his name-calling and obvious target. They were programmed smart enough to recognize and avoid certain attack patterns if the attacks were repeated enough, and to avoid firing if the shot was obstructed, so he wasn't expecting it to work too well, but the vast majority abandoned the circling pattern they had been in to follow him.

Mighty waited until the angry sound of the buzzbomber's pursuit had disappeared down the beach, gathering as many rocks as he could find. There were more of them this close to the beach, and he grabbed about a dozen of them, then broke cover and sprinted for the docks. Their metallic moonlit gleam seemed entirely too far away over the sandy stretch, but he and Ray made it without incident, although the buzzbombers that had remained had opened fire. Mighty took the two of them out with rocks he had picked up before making the dash. Luck was with them, there was a small -at least by Robotnik's standards- ship, maybe thirty five feet long, with a small, protected cabin for the captain to steer the ship from. Mighty set down the rest of the rocks he had picked up, shoved the door open and stepped into the cramped space. It was meant for a human, so the controls were rather too high for him. He found a coil of rope on the deck and used it as a stepping stool. There were a lot of fancy instruments whose meaning he didn't begin to understand, but the steering wheel looked simple enough. He searched around for the ignition. After hesitantly flipping a few switches, including, thankfully, the one that controlled the lights, he found the main power switch. The console lit up, green status lights winking all over. After another minute of fumbling he found the switch that controlled the engines. He pressed it.

"ID key please," said a pleasant female voice. Mighty jumped in surprise before realizing it was just the standard computer voice, and that he was alone, except for Ray, who had crept into the cabin with him. Mighty looked around, trying to guess what this ID key thing could be.

"Uh, sorry," he mumbled to the computer, "I, uh, forgot mine. Could you please start the motors?"

"Please insert your ID key card into the slot to start the engines," the voice said. Red lights highlighted the slot in question.

"I don't have one!" Mighty said, the stress causing his voice to crack just a bit, "I don't even know what that is!" To have made it so far, to be stopped by a stupid computer voice. It was just awful. He fought back tears of frustration.

"Do you think it's something like this?" Ray asked, holding up a thin slip of plastic between his fingers. He slipped it into the slot. Nothing happened for a moment, then the voice said, "Greetings, Dr. Robotnik. Engines ignited." There was a rumble beneath their feet as the boat came to life.

"Ray, how did you, when did you…?" Mighty began.

Ray grinned weakly, "I took it from Robotnik the other day. He just left it lying around while he was talking to me. I don't think he ever even realized it was gone. Must have had more than one, I guess."

"Good job," Mighty said, still a bit flabbergasted. He began attempting to figure out how the motors worked. The throttle wasn't too hard, hold down the trigger, push forward to go faster, pull back to slow down. He put the boat through a few jerky start and stop motions, trying not to speed away from the dock and leave Sonic while also trying to learn to control the ship's motions.

"I unhooked the cable that was keeping it tied to the dock," Ray said quietly, as though unsure he had done what he was supposed to.

"Good job," Mighty said again, surprised by this display of initiative. By now the boat had drifted some several feet from the dock, though not further than Sonic could clear with a running leap. Sonic could leap an amazing distance with a running start. He must be on his way back soon, Mighty thought, although it was difficult to accurately mark time without any sort of device and while trying to steal a boat. He watched the shoreline intently. For several long moments there was nothing, then there was a huge plume of dust, which turned to spray at the water's edge, then Sonic was in the boat with them, shouting something garbled that Mighty couldn't understand. It sounded like he was talking double voiced, one offset from the other and quieter. Then the effect faded and he realized Sonic was yelling "Go! Go! Get this thing moving!"

Behind Sonic Mighty could see the dark shadows of Buzzbombers flitting across the intervening distance. He turned the boat away from the island and pushed the throttle forward. It leapt through the small choppy waves with only a slight bouncing for protest. He turned to Sonic and said, "Did you…?"

Sonic grinned back, "Did I run on water? Outrun my own voice? Circle the island and grab like eighty rings? Yes, Yes and Yes. Fastest thing alive here. Actually, I wasn't sure I could do that until just now. It was pretty awesome."

Mighty turned back to the buzzbombers, shaking his head in amazement. The boat was moving at a pretty good clip, but they were gaining. He picked up a rock and threw it, taking out the lead one. Beside him, Sonic picked up another rock from the pile. He twisted his body into an odd, strained looking posture, then whipped out of it all in one motion, spinning like a discus thrower and propelling his rock with every bit of the speed and force Mighty's had had, taking out the second closest. They took out four more between them, and then suddenly the rest peeled off and headed back toward the island, which was fast becoming just a small dark blur on the horizon.

"Huh," said Sonic, "We must have gotten too far away."

"Great," said Mighty, meaning it, but also wondering what the next step was, "Now where do we go from here?"

"That way," said Ray, pointing in the direction from whence the rising sun would illuminate the water in a few hours, "Home is that way."


	2. Chapter 2

It was still several hours before dawn when the boat reached the island they all called home. Rather than bother trying to dock it, they sailed toward an empty stretch of sand. Mighty jumped out as soon as the water was shallow enough to stand in and dragged the boat to a spot on the beach high above the tide line, an impossible task for most but one that barely affected his breathing. The village was dark and quiet when they approached. A few lines of gleaming rings spun in place in front of and between the houses, silently reflecting moonlight. Unfortunately, it wasn't the quiet of peaceful slumber that greeted them, but rather the quiet of empty stillness. Sonic glanced at Mighty and Ray and could tell that they realized it too. Closer inspection revealed scorch marks from errant laser bolts all over the buildings and the ground around them, but no bodies. Sonic was unsure whether that was a good thing. On the one hand, it meant that the robots had come here to capture, not kill. On the other hand, it meant Robotnik had something else planned for them. Whatever it was, he wouldn't get the chance, Sonic swore, and he'd pay if a single person were hurt.

"Come on, let's go look inside," Sonic said.

"Why?" Mighty asked.

"In case they left anyone," Sonic replied.

Mighty nodded. It was inky black inside the houses, even with the moon bathing the village in a pale silver glow. They had to fumble around in the impenetrable blackness of the first house until Ray managed to find and light an oil lamp. Things were overturned and there were more scorch marks on the inside walls, but for the most part it looked like it had been the scene of a minor scuffle rather than a concerted attempt at destruction, as though the robots had completely ignored the structure once the occupants had been removed. The next several houses were much the same, although some were virtually untouched. They were on the verge of abandoning the search when an arm snaked out of the shadowy doorway of one of the unchecked houses and dragged Ray inside as he passed by, extinguishing his lamp in the process.

"Ray!" Mighty yelled, charging for the doorway into which his friend had disappeared. Sonic was twice as far away, but he was past Mighty in the blink of an eye.

"Whoa, steady on lads!" said a voice from the shadows, causing Sonic to stop short and Mighty to nearly crash into him.

"Matt? Is that you?" Sonic asked warily, peering into the murky darkness.

"Aye, now get in here and be quiet before you get us all captured or killed!"

Sonic stepped cautiously into the house, straining his eyes to see. As they adjusted to the darkness he was able to make out the outlines of Ray and the rabbit the voice from the shadows belonged to. Mighty followed behind even more suspiciously.

"Ray?" he asked. "Are you all right?"

"Oh, oh yeah," Ray responded. "I was just startled and I dropped the lamp, that's all. Sorry."

"Keep your voices down," Matt cautioned them in a whisper. "I'm sorry about that, but the way you all were traipsing around you'll bring the badniks down on our heads."

"Badniks?" Sonic asked.

"The robots. Robotnik sent his machines after us. We should have known he was no good."

"Yeah, we got that," Mighty said. "But what are you doing here?"

"General Prower sent me to grab some supplies from the village. Foodstuffs, mostly. And I could ask the same question of you. How did you lot get here? I thought you were stuck in that tyrant's fortress."

"We were," Sonic said. "We broke out and stole a boat."

"You stole a boat?" Matt whistled approvingly in response. "We could have used another boat in the evacuation, and we'll need it to get the rest off."

"Evacuation? The rest?" Sonic asked. "And you said General Prower sent you. So he didn't get everybody? What happened to the rest?"

"When the badniks attacked, they got maybe a score of people before we managed to get ourselves out of bed and in fighting order. General Prower led the defense and ordered everyone who couldn't fight to evacuate. We held the bots off, distracted them, while the women and children and elders got into the boats. We kept it up until they were clear, and continued to hold the line as long as we could. When it was clear this was a fight we couldn't win, the badniks had stunned and captured too many of ours, we broke ranks and scattered into the jungle. We met up in our fallback position in the caves. Prower's having us lie low and wait for stragglers, rest and organize for the moment, but we plan to attack the prison base and free as many people as we can. Then we'll drive the bastard off our islands and send somebody to let our families know it's safe to come back. If we can't do that, we'll get as many more off the islands as we can. For now, at least, most of our families are safely on the way to Acorn."

"Acorn?" Mighty asked incredulously. "But that's so far away!"

"I know how you feel, lad, my family is on those boats too. But it's the only way. Sending them to another one of the islands wouldn't be safe, and we can't expect them to float out on the water for days waiting for us. If we can't retake the islands they'd have to go there anyway, and what if we all get killed and can't get a message to them to tell them to leave?"

"Yeah, that makes sense," Sonic said. "But there's no way I'm letting Robuttnik keep our islands. Tell us what General Prower wants us to grab and let's take it to him."

"We can't. The entrance to the caves is flooded at high tide, we won't be able to get in until dawn."

"So what?" Sonic asked. "That's not the only entrance. There's at least two that I know of in the ruins."

"We can't use those. There are too many badniks crawling around that area. They've seen a few of us disappear around there, and they seem to realize we're penned up in a hidey-hole."

"That's no problem," Sonic said. "We wrecked a bunch of bots on our way out already. If any of them spot us we'll just trash 'em."

"Look, I know you boys are special, but these things are dangerous. I don't think they're the same ones you broke earlier."

"Step outside and we'll show you," Sonic said, grinning like he had a good joke to tell. "Mighty, if you would?" He asked, gesturing across the threshold with an odd flourish.

"Um, okay," Mighty said, unsure of exactly what Sonic was planning but not looking forward to whatever it was,and stepped past. Sonic and Ray followed him out. Matt lingered in the doorway, saying, "What are you doing? It's too dangerous to be outside, a patrol could come by any second!"

"Relax, just trust us and watch this," Sonic said. "Mighty, if you'd be so kind as to destroy that tree?" He gestured dramatically in the direction of an impressive palm tree in the middle of the village. Sonic had a flair for showmanship, or for showing off, some might say, and he delighted in any opportunity to be the center of attention, although this time he had decided to be the stage master rather than the performer for some reason, perhaps giving Mighty the limelight in a misplaced act of generosity. Mighty simply walked over and shattered the trunk with a single unembellished strike, in a small act of protest against Sonic's posturing. The tree fell with a thunderous crash. That was still good enough for Sonic, who grinned from ear to ear as he watched Matt's reaction.

"Oh," said Matt weakly from the doorway. "That, uh, I guess that changes things."

"Told you," Sonic said. "Now, what do you want us to bring?"

To his credit, Matt regained his composure quickly. "Anything that looks useful. Like I said, I'm mostly just supposed to grab any perishable foods, but kerosene, matches, anything that burns would be good too. It gets dark in the caves. We'll need to find extra backpacks to carry stuff, since I only brought three."

"Wait," Mighty said. "Three backpacks for just you? Wouldn't it make more sense to send three people?"

"We did," Matt replied. "Johnny and Rob are in the forest. Since we weren't planning to go back until after sunrise it made more sense to just send one person at a time into the village and have the other two hide. If I got found and captured they could still get away. Matter of fact, I should probably go let them know that all that noise earlier was just you boys and not me getting seen by a patrol."

"I d-don't think that's a good idea right now," Ray said,

"What? Why?" Matt asked.

"Because they're not the only ones who heard it," Ray said, pointing toward a line of glowing red eyes advancing down the street.

"Oh no," Matt moaned. "They've seen us!"

"Good!" Sonic said, racing towards the inbound robots. "Saves me the trouble of having to find them!"

"Sonic!" Mighty said as the blue blur shot past him, reaching out as though to drag Sonic back by the scruff of the neck. "Wait!" he added feebly, dropping his arm. He knew how difficult it was to dissuade Sonic once he had chosen a course of action.

"Well," he said ruefully, "if Johnnyl and Rob thought you'd run into trouble before, they'll know it now. I'd better go help him before he bites off more than he can chew."

Meanwhile, Sonic had already downed two of the robos, and the rest had opened fire.

"You guys are pretty boring company," he said, vaulting over a salvo of laser fire and pounding in the head of another robo. "Where's the challenge?" The robots responded with more laser fire.

"See," Sonic said, zigzagging between the blasts and crumpling another bot, "that's exactly what I mean. You try to shoot me, I dodge, and then I break you."

Then Mighty was in the fray, tossing bots left and right. The patrol had consisted of twenty or so robots. In less than a minute it was nothing but scrap metal.

"Too easy!" Sonic crowed. "Piece of cake!"

"Still," Mighty chided him, "I wish you wouldn't go jumping into fights like that. We could have just run."

"Pshaw, and skip the fun?"

"One of these days you're going to get us in serious trouble."

"I can… what's that noise?" Sonic asked.

"I dunno" Mighty replied, raising his voice to be heard over the rumbling that filled the air. "It sounds like an engine!"

Sonic saw it first. "Holy… what is that thing?" he asked as he spotted the massive vehicle bearing down on them. It barreled forward on a huge pair of treads, the metal tower on top standing taller than the short, one story houses of the village and gleaming silver in the moonlight. An enormous wrecking ball hung by a thick chain from a long, counterweighted arm covered in triangle bracing. It gunned the engine and accelerated at them with a feral roar. Sonic and Mighty dove out of the way and the machine thundered past them, crashing toward the houses, and straight at Ray, who stood rooted to the spot, trembling in terror. Sonic was beside the machine in a flash, and then in front of it, scooping up the petrified squirrel and carrying him clear of the thing's treads before he even had a chance to scream. Sonic moved so quickly that Ray didn't realize he'd been snatched out of harm's way until he opened his eyes several seconds later to see why he wasn't a squirrel pancake, by which point Sonic had already reached the tree line.

"Get into the trees and hide," Sonic commanded him, "I don't want you getting run over. I'll be back." And like magic, he was gone.

Meanwhile, the crane's rush had carried it into the middle of the houses, crushing one of them. The vehicle wasn't built for speed or maneuverability, and bereft of the momentum that had carried it over and through the first house, it could not easily free itself from the structures that encircled it, lacking the necessary acceleration to reach any kind of speed in the tiny area. Instead, the arm on top of the treads swung out and brought the wrecking ball around to crash through one of the houses.

Matt came sctumbling out of the house where he had been hiding as the wrecking ball tore its roof off, but between the machine, the rubble it had created and the wrecking ball whistling through the air he had nowhere to run. Mighty charged to the rescue, only to be lifted off his feet and thrown several yards through the air as the wrecking ball caught him in the side. A palm tree arrested his flight, although it snapped under the impact. Even as Mighty fell to the ground, stunned, Sonic sped towards Matt, who was frantically trying to avoid being smashed by the wrecking ball. Unlike Mighty, he had no chance to survive being clobbered and flung through the air. Matt dodged, throwing himself flat as the wrecking ball passed overhead, and Sonic curled into a ball as the sweep of its arc carried it directly into his path. He rolled along the ground, still moving at incredible speed, and the ball whizzed harmlessly, if narrowly, over his quills. Matt scrambled to his feet and made a break for the relative safety of the road, but the wrecking ball swung back in his direction, threatening to pulverize him. Sonic jumped and curled, slamming into the wrecking ball, using his own momentum to redirect its motion even as it flung him backward against the wall, winding him. Matt stopped and started to head back for Sonic, but Mighty had regained his feet, and as he ran toward Sonic he grabbed Matt and threw him in the opposite direction, towards the road and away from the machine.

Mighty reached Sonic just in time to prevent the ball from crushing him, slamming it sideways with his fist so that it hit the next house over instead of the one Sonic was leaning against.

"Grab some rings," He told Sonic, "they helped me get back up after the wrecking ball-" he stopped to swat it away as they dodged its return path, "Hit me. There are a bunch over there," he finished, pointing to a gap between two of the unsmashed houses. Sonic nodded, and went to grab them. Having regained his wind with the rings he vaulted up onto the treads, looking for the section that housed the controls as Mighty avoided another strike from the ball. Most of Robotnik's robots had a head of some kind, and smashing those invariably disabled the robot. This thing didn't have a head, but it did appear to have some kind of locked booth. He couldn't see what was inside, but it seemed like a good target. He drew back an arm and punched the glass. Although he was far from weak, Sonic was no Mighty, and the window did not give. A few cracks spiderwebbed out from where his knuckles hit the glass, but the most significant result was the painful throbbing in his fist.

While Sonic bounced around the machine, looking for an opening, Mighty went for the wrecking ball. As it swung toward him again, he dug in his heels and tried to grab it, with only partial success. There were no edges to grip, and the ball was moving too quickly. His fingers slipped off after a second of searching vainly for purchase and he was thrown sprawling in the dirt. On top of the machine, Sonic was having no more luck. He tried to spindash the door, but there wasn't enough room, and it was difficult to get a position that would allow him to strike it from the ground, especially since it kept moving. Mighty's second attempt at the wrecking ball was more successful. He managed to slow the ball, still on an erratic course from his last grab at it, enough to deliver a crushing punch that sent it crashing into the side of the vehicle, narrowly missing Sonic.

As the machine swayed drunkenly, Mighty followed up on his advantage. He leapt on top of the wrecking ball, grabbed the chain that attached it to the crane, and gave a mighty wrench. The arm bent, metal shrieking in protest, and then the chain snapped, and the ball came free. Mighty swung it, half crushing the treads on the right side.

"Mighty!" Sonic shouted as the machine shook beneath his feet and nearly tossed him off. "Quit fooling around and help me get this door open!"

Mighty threw the wrecking ball aside and climbed up onto the now immobilized treads beside Sonic. He ripped the door off its hinges with one hand and reached inside the cab to confront the robot inside, which promptly exploded with enough force to knock Mighty to the ground.

"RAAGH!" Mighty snarled, as his frayed temper snapped entirely. He grabbed the ruined treads and flipped the machine over, tossing Sonic off entirely. The blue hedgehog landed neatly on his feet as the titanic hunk of metal landed with an earthshaking crash.

"Whoa, easy there man," Sonic said, as the rage abated from Mighty's eyes and his heavy breathing subsided.

"Aah…" Mighty said, wincing and rubbing his shoulder as they walked out of the ring of ruined houses and back towards the street. "I think I pulled a muscle."

"Yeah," Sonic agreed, "looks like it. You're limping too. C'mon, we'd better get Ray and start packing before another one of those things shows up and wrecks even more houses."

"That was… something else… lads," Matt said, meeting them on the path. "What happened to you boys?"

"What do you mean?" Sonic asked. "We got in a fight with a giant wrecking machine, what do you think happened to us?"

"No," Matt replied, "I mean what did Robotnik do to you two? I've never seen anything like that!"

"Oh, I dunno," Sonic said, unconcernedly. "But it's pretty cool, huh?" He dashed off and returned with Ray before Matt and Mighty had time to do more than exchange glances. "I can run faster than the speed of sound now," he announced grandly as he deposited Ray on the ground.

"I, uh, how fast is that?" Matt asked.

"Uh, one thousand something kilometers per hour…" Sonic said. "I don't remember exactly, but it's really fast, and I'm faster!"

"That's…quite impressive," Matt said. "It looks like you were telling the truth when you said you could handle the badniks. Still, I'd rather not stand around here waiting for more of them to show up, so let's grab what we can and go."

Filling the backpacks was slow work. First they had to dig them out from the rubble, then they were limited by having only the flashlight that Matt had brought, since the oil lamp had been smashed, until they could find more. Fully eight houses had been destroyed, and several more damaged, which meant both fewer houses to check and more work to move between them. All in all, it took not quite half an hour, but it felt like several. Finally though, they were all loaded up with a full backpack.

They were just preparing to leave when Mighty spotted a pair of dark shapes moving in their direction, outside of the ring of light his lantern emitted. He was about to call out, but the shapes beat him to it.

"Mighty?" one of them asked, and he realized it was Johnny and Rob, as Matt confirmed a moment later.

"Rob? Johnny?"

"Matt?" was the uncertain response.

"What are you doing?"

"We heard a lot of noise, and we came to see what happened," one of them replied, but Mighty couldn't be sure which one.

"I told you to stay hidden, especially if you heard something!"

"Well, we waited until it was quiet again. What happened to all the houses, and what are Sonic and Mighty doing here?" Rob asked as Sonic joined Matt and Mighty in the circle of light. At least, Mighty was pretty sure it was Rob.

"Long story. The short of it is, one of Robotnik's badniks, a giant monster one, attacked and destroyed several of the houses before Sonic and Mighty stopped it."

"What?"

"Yeah," Sonic added. "We ran into a little trouble,"

"You call that a little trouble?"

"Sounds about right," Sonic said.


	3. Chapter 3

Author's note: This is the first one written by my coauthor, so if the style is a little different, that's why. Bonus question, two of the secondary characters (Matt, Rob, Johnny) are characters from one of the official Sonic continuities (not necessarily both from the SAME one) The other we made up. Who is the impostor?

"Where do you guys think you're going?" Rob, a teal Hedgehog wearing a hooded shirt, gloves, boots, bow and quiver, asked Sonic, Mighty and Ray. The three were oriented approximately northward, in the direction of the ruins that were colloquially known as Marble Garden.

"To the caves?" Sonic replied. "Isn't that where Prower's holed up?"

"Yeah," Johnny, a Rabbit dressed similarly to Rob, but with a sling and staff instead of a bow, said. "But we can't go through Marble Garden because of all the badniks!"

"Oh psh," Sonic said dismissively. "We're not worried about a few bots. Are we?"

"Not really no," Mighty said with wavering confidence.

"I kind of am…" Ray said quietly.

"If you're not scared of them then you're naive," Johnny said. "We've barely been staying alive out here."

"Didn't I tell you about what these lads did?" Matt asked incredulously. "If what I saw before was any indication, they'll be fine."

"Really, Matt," Johnny began to protest before Matt cut him off.

"No buts," Matt said tersely. "I think these two may be the break we were looking for, and I aim to let them do their thing."

"Are they really that good?" Rob asked, not convinced.

"I can guarantee that we can do more than you can with that bow," Sonic said boastfully.

"You know how good I am with the bow," Rob said. "You think you might want to think a little harder about that statement?" Rob was a bit of an archery prodigy.

"Is that a challenge?" Sonic asked.

"Oh be quiet," Mighty broke in. "Let's save that energy for the bots." Sonic and Rob stared each other down while Mighty started walking, and the rest followed. "Are you two coming?" Sonic and Rob turned to follow.

"Seriously," Mighty began to say as Sonic caught up, "I don't think that this is the time to be boastful."

"Yeah, yeah," Sonic replied absent-mindedly. "I suppose you're right…" Mighty looked annoyed for a moment, and then settled for that small victory.

"So which batch of caves are you guys in exactly?" Sonic asked Matt.

"We're in the northwestern group, the ones that are the furthest underground," he answered. "You know where they are, right?"

"Of course," Sonic said. "I used to play in there all the time. This'll be no problem."

"I always thought those caves were kind of scary," Ray said.

"Don't worry Ray," Mighty said reassuringly. "I won't let anything happen to you, and we're going to have friends there."

"Thanks Mighty."

"Keep your eyes open now," Rob cautioned. "We're at the edge of the Marble Ruins."

The Marble Ruins was so named for the decaying carved stone ruins that it was filled with. No one on South Island knew where the white marble columns, statues and buildings had come from or who had built them, but that had never stopped speculation and mythmaking. One story proposed that they were the result of an ancient, now extinct species that once inhabited the island. Another claimed that Aurora herself and the other gods had built the structures for their worshippers. A third, generally unsupported theory postulated that they were just random slabs of stone and to extrapolate any sort of meaning in their appearance was silly.

Sonic ran to and fro, around the columns and other hunks of stone that littered Marble Ruins, while the others briskly but cautiously kept up on the same path.

"I wish he wouldn't do that," Johnny said bitterly. "He's going to bring the badniks down on us that way, running around for fun."

"He's probably scouting," Mighty said, "trying to cover as much area as he can."

"I'm sure," Johnny said sarcastically. "I don't even know how he can see anything traveling that fast."

"It's when he's going three or four times faster that I start to get confused," Mighty said. Johnny's mouth dropped open just a little before he managed to get it closed again.

"You can't be serious," Rob said. "There's no way he can be that fast."

"Oh," Mighty said, "believe it." Suddenly Sonic dashed back into view, stopping on a dime right in front of the others.

"Alright guys," he said, without the slightest hint of breathlessness, "bots up ahead over the next big ridge. They almost seem to be constructing something, but I don't know what. There's some buzz bombers, egg-robos and a handful of gunners."

"What?" Johnny asked. "What are you talking about?"

"Oh, I forgot to tell you," Sonic said. "I've started naming the robots. It makes them easier to talk about. I just hadn't given you the message, I guess."

"Give it to us now then," Matt said.

"Buzzbombers are those things that look kind of like wasps or bees, egg-robos are the portly little round guys that usually carry a weapon of some sort, and gunners are those taller, meaner looking ones with the gun hands."

"Makes enough sense to me," Rob said simply. "Good idea."

"Robotnik already calls the wasp ones buzzbombers," Mighty said. "So this wasn't exactly a completely original concept."

"You just had to tell them that, didn't you?" Sonic asked half-jokingly. "You couldn't have just let them think I was clever, could you?"

"I didn't want to give them any false hope," Mighty replied in turn.

"Touché," Sonic replied flatly.

"Um, guys?" Ray said timidly. "How far away did Sonic say the bots were again?" He pointed ahead. Everyone turned to see a group of four buzzbombers heading straight for them.

"Shoot!" Matt said, drawing his sling. Johnny did the same, and Rob cocked an arrow.

"Crap," Sonic said, "they're too high to reach."

"Just a sec lad," Matt said as he slung his rock. It managed to clip one of the bots, sending it off course. Johnny let his fly, hitting the same bot and making it drop. The two repeated this maneuver once more. Meanwhile, Rob seemed to still be aiming.

"What are you waiting for man?" Sonic asked impatiently. Matt motioned for him to wait.

Finally, Rob let his arrow fly. One of the buzzbombers went down with an arrow in its head. Sonic was about to scoff, that long to fell a single bot? Then the other one spiraled lazily out of the air and crashed, fluid leaking from where the arrow had passed through a wing joint on its way to fell the first bomber.

"Okay," Sonic admitted, "that was impressive."

"Let's get moving," Rob said, "so I can show you some more." Sonic nodded, and they all started moving, faster this time.

The ground became hilly, and then they began to climb up the ridge that Sonic had mentioned before. They slowed as they reached the top. Finally, they could see just what Sonic had been talking about: a group of robots were in the area. Some of them were simply patrolling, but others seemed to be guarding something, standing near a hole that had been carved into the hillside. Buzzbombers flew overhead.

"What are they doing?" Ray asked.

"I don't know…" Mighty answered, trying to find the answer himself. "Mining for something maybe?"

"They're looking for the caves!" Matt gasped.

"Or maybe they already know where we are," Rob suggested, "and they're trying to ambush General Prower and the others."

"Either way," Sonic said, "we're gonna stop them."

"No, wait!" Matt tried to get his attention, but it was too late. Sonic easily leapt over the crest of the ridge and was halfway down the hill already.

"Well?" Rob asked. "What are we waiting for?" He ran after Sonic, an arrow at the ready. Matt shrugged and followed, with Johnny behind him.

"Make your way down the hill," Mighty said to Ray, "but stay out of the bots' sights. Just yell real loud if you need me and I'll rescue you, okay?" Ray nodded, and then Mighty too was off.

By the time Rob came to the bottom of the hill, he had already downed two bots and partially disabled two more. However, Sonic had fully destroyed four.

"What took you so long?" Sonic asked while jumping over an egg-robo and knocking it into another with a kick to the head.

"I thought I'd let you have some fun before I hogged all the rest," Rob joked back. "Duck!"

Sonic did just that right as Rob fired an arrow into the eye of an egg-robo that had been about to catch Sonic unawares. Sonic dashed to it, pulled the arrow out and then jammed it into the bot's other eye, blinding it.

Matt and Johnny worked in tandem to bash the egg-robos' knee-caps and elbows so that they could not move or fire their weapons, and paid close attention to further groups of buzzbombers arriving in the sky. When Mighty made it to the bottom of the hill, he dashed into one egg-robo and ripped the arms out of another.

"Gunner!" Sonic cried out, and everyone else dropped or hid as it let loose a flurry of lasers. Sonic deftly jumped over the assault, curling into a spinning ball as he fell, cutting off one of the gunner's arms. He hit the ground spinning, dashing around and hopping back into the air to sever the other arm, coming to a full stop facing the amputated robot.

The gunner looked surprised for a moment, as if it did not know what to do. Then a plate on its chest opened up to reveal a circular hole of some sort. Sonic just barely dashed out of the way as a gigantic laser filled the air where he had just been. While the gunner was still immobile, Mighty snuck up on it, jumped up to its height and punched its head off.

"The other ones didn't do that," Sonic said, a little surprised.

"Well," Mighty responded, "you never cut the arms off of the other ones."

"Good point," Sonic conceded.

"How did you do that, by the way?" Rob asked. I mean, how did you know where you were going?"

Sonic was about to answer, then stopped, thinking. "You know, I have no idea."

More robots began streaming out of the forest. "This isn't getting us far," Matt said. "Let's go into the hole." The others nodded.

"Ray!" Mighty called. The young Flying Squirrel emerged from his hiding spot. "We're going underground."

"I'll cover our tracks a bit," Sonic said as he quickly disabled a few of the newer bots that had arrived while the others disappeared into the hole. He ran than ran to the edge and looked in.

"Man," he said sincerely, "this is just too fun."


	4. Chapter 4

"It's so d-dark and creepy in here," Ray said as they followed the sloping tunnel on its gently snaking path down into the earth. Matt held the flashlight, sweeping the narrow circle of light back and forth in front of them. It provided poor comfort against the pressing darkness of the tunnel, illuminating only one small patch at a time. The dirt floor was hard compacted beneath their feet, and oddly patterned as though it had been packed into place by enormous treads. The tunnel was perhaps ten feet wide, enough for four to walk abreast without difficulty, and roughly as tall, although dimensions were difficult to make out in the inky darkness. It was impossible to see both walls through the gloom at the same time, and when the light focused on the floor the ceiling stretched cavernously into the shadows above, just out of sight but still looming there in ominous blackness. Steel supports framed the passage every dozen feet or so, like gleaming ribs of some gigantic earthen gullet. The oppressive gloom of the tunnel weighed down on them, quashing conversation. Even the normally irrepressible Sonic found himself walking mutely down the tunnel, speculating darkly on Robotnik's betrayal. Mighty started violently as a trickle of dirt fell on him from the unseen ceiling, and they hurried deeper in.

"Shh…" Sonic said after an eternity that might have encompassed a few minutes. The uniform dimness of the tunnel gave not hint to the passage of time.

The group stopped dead, listening intently to the ghostly metallic clanging that seemed to emanate from the very walls, impossible to trace. A low rumbling underscored the noise, equally disembodied, and, under that, barely audible and so faint it might have been imagined, the tramp of robotic feet.

"Drat," whispered Mighty, "which direction is it coming from? I can't tell because of the echo."

"I think," Sonic said, ears quivering as he attempted to pinpoint the source of the sound, "it might be both. Definitely up ahead though. We'll know for sure pretty soon here."

The noises grew steadily louder as they advanced cautiously down the tunnel, indicating Sonic was correct, although the echoes still made it hard to pinpoint a source.

"Intruders!" Came the chorus of a dozen robotic voices, along with the chk-chak sound of weapons being lowered.

"Down!" Sonic and Mighty bellowed in unison, pulling their companions to the floor as laser fire ripped through the air where they had been standing. Matt dropped the flashlight as he fell, and it cut off as it hit the ground. Mighty felt a great gust of wind as Sonic rushed past him toward the robots, and then all was chaos. In the flashes of red light that accompanied each shot he saw Sonic pummel robot after robot into submission, seeming to warp rather than cross the space between each due to the intermittent nature of the light. By the time Mighty had managed to find where the flashlight had rolled and flick it on the din of combat had been replaced with the omnipresent rumbling that filled the cave, and Sonic was brushing off his gloves over the crumpled remains of the Egg Robos.

"Shoot," he said. "We should have killed the light and looked for the eyes."

"How can you see where you're going in the dark?" Mighty asked as Sonic poked a small burn mark on his arm where a laser had grazed him.

"I can't," Sonic replied automatically, then realized how absurd that sounded given that he had just demolished an entire squad of Egg Robos. "Uh, wow…" he said, forehead furrowing in thought, "that was… instinct, I guess."

"Whatever it was, it was impressive," Rob admitted with a dip of his head.

Mighty nodded, a barely perceptible motion. "You don't mess around. Look at this." He swung the flashlight in a wide arc. The tunnel opened into a spacious cavern just ahead of them. Stalagmites reared like broken teeth, flashing with a thin layer of moisture as the light passed over them. The ceiling, already high overhead, soared upwards to nearly twenty feet, and Sonic could see stalactites mirroring their counterparts on the floor. Here and there a pair had grown together to form a column. Even with the help of the flashlight he couldn't make out the far wall. The middle of the floor was a flat and featureless path, although stalagmites lined either side, seeming to stand in formation. Mighty brought the light to rest on a large pile of steel beams roughly in the center of the floor that Sonic instantly recognized.

"Oh, those are the supports from the tunnel," he commented.

"Yeah," Johnny replied, "they're shoring it up as they go."

Mighty picked one of the beams up and hefted it like a club with his free hand, wincing a bit as he worked his tender shoulder. "Hmm," he mused, before gently slinging it over his shoulder for easy carrying and walking on.

Sonic and the others followed him to the far wall, where the path branched into three tunnels like the one they had entered from.

"Huh," Mighty frowned, "Which one should we follow?"

"I don't know," Matt said, "it sounds like there's more company on the way, but I don't know from which one." Indeed, the tramp of feet marching in the unnaturally precise step only afforded by machines emanated from the tunnels.

Mighty shone the light down each tunnel in turn, revealing nothing but a uniform procession into stygian obscurity. With a shrug he started down the right hand one, but before he had made it a dozen yards he was chased back up the tunnel by a hail of laser fire from the robos lying in wait beyond the reach of his light.

"Dibs on this tunnel, you guys take the other two!" Sonic crowed, launching himself at the unseen enemy.

"Sonic, wait!" Mighty started to say, but once again Sonic was gone before he had managed to utter a syllable. "He never listens," Mighty sighed in frustration, turning to address the others, "Let's try the middle tunnel," he added, as he started down it.

"What about Sonic?" Johnny asked. "Shouldn't we go help him?"

"Sonic can handle himself," Mighty replied. "You saw how he wrecked those things earlier. Besides," he muttered, "he deserves whatever burns and scrapes he gets."

Sonic had no trouble locating the bots responsible for the attack. They were only a hundred yards up the tunnel, a distance he could cover in less than a second even in absolute blackness. Three of them were scrap before the others had completed the word "intruder". Sonic knew, intellectually, that this should be impossible because he could not see in the dark. He also knew, on some deeper level, that he did not need to see. He knew, unerringly, where his opponents were, and how to reach them. Of course, he knew where he was going even when running at speeds far too extreme for any eye of flesh to follow, even when curled into a ball and spinning at speeds that should have made orientation impossible, so perhaps it was not so unreasonable that he would know these things in the dark too.

All this ran through his conscious mind as he fought, relegating the combat itself to his subconscious. It took him a little over a minute to bash the horde into senseless pieces of metal, not that they ever had more than a facsimile of sense to begin with. It was a good, cathartic workout, putting his rage at the doctor to constructive use deconstructing his murder machines.

There were robots in the middle tunnel as well. This time, though, Mighty was expecting it, and he charged their ranks with the flashlight in one hand and the steel beam in the other. It was a bit unwieldy to swing in a tunnel as wide as the beam was long, so he threw it at the robots, smashing several outright. The remainder he bludgeoned with his fist. When nothing was left but crumpled metal, he retrieved the steel beam and bent it such that the last third of its length doubled back on itself, forming it into a weapon of more practical length. He noted absently as he did so that the robots he had just destroyed were split between the typical armed egg robos and an unarmed, blockier variety that he assumed was designed for construction instead of combat.

Rob was bringing up the rear of Mighty's group. Thinking he heard footsteps behind him he turned around to check his back and nearly jumped out of his skin as he came face to face with an Egg Robo.

"Boo!" Sonic said, shaking with laughter and clutching the Egg Robo head that he held just over Rob's shoulder. The rumbling had concealed his approach.

"Dammit Sonic!" Rob shouted. "Don't do that!"

"Oh come on," Sonic said. "That was priceless. Look what it does," he continued, pointing it at the wall. "The eyes are like a flashlight!" The eyes projected a faint scarlet glow that dimly illuminated a small area in front of them. It didn't provide nearly the amount of visibility that the flashlight did, but it was enough to see where you were putting your feet.

"That's creepy," Johhny said. "Get rid of that thing."

"No, it's mine!" Sonic said, dancing out of reach as Rob made a swipe at it.

"C'mon guys," Mighty said. "Let's keep moving."

As they advanced the rumbling noise continued to grow steadily louder, overpowering all other sounds. Mighty was beginning to wonder how much louder it could get, and what could be making such a sound, when something metallic gleamed as he swept the flashlight over the space in front of him. He hurried forward, and found himself staring at an absolutely enormous drill. It took up nearly the entire front, (or was it back?) of the vehicle it was attached to, which, from what little Mighty could see, appeared to be another large chassis on treads, streamlined to funnel the dirt back behind it as it moved. Without the worker bots clearing the path behind it, this was starting to pile up, and Mighty found himself buried up to the knees as he tried to get a closer look at it.

"I wonder why Robuttnik needs such a big drill," Sonic snickered as he came up beside Mighty, still holding the head of the Egg Robo.

There was a slight hiss and a click as two slots opened to reveal a pair of turrets on either side of the drill. Sonic and Mighty threw themselves into the dirt as jets of rock dissolving acid sprayed from the nozzles of the turrets, melting the dirt behind them with a venomous hiss and turning that section of path into a seething, bubbling morass. A few drops landed on Mighty, leaving sizzling burn marks as they ate into his flesh. Sonic's anguished yelp indicated that he suffered similar injuries. Mighty struggled to his feet and stabbed the beam, which had thankfully escaped the acid, at the machine. He heard something crumple before the beam was knocked sideways into the wall, painfully wrenching his injured shoulder, but had no idea whether he'd gotten the turret since the flashlight was stuck in the dirt. He groped for it with his other hand, listening to the threatening sounds coming from the drill machine. Finally he managed to retrieve it and knock the dirt loose. The sight that greeted his eyes was distressing. The machine had backed a few feet down the tunnel, and the drill was now spinning very rapidly, ready to impale and tear them to shreds.

Sonic launched himself at it, and was flung bodily against the wall, sporting several minor cuts. The machine revved its engine dangerously.

"Run!" Sonic shouted, kicking up a huge spray of dirt as he suited action to word. Mighty swung the flashlight to look behind him and saw Rob retreating in accordance with Sonic's suggestion. The others were already out of sight.

"Wait!" Mighty said as Sonic tried to grab him and drag him up the tunnel. "I've got an idea!"

"What?"

"Just hold on for a second. Don't run until I say so, then get us both down the tunnel as fast as you can."

"Got it," Sonic nodded.

Mighty tossed his club as far as he could up the tunnel. He hoped it would be clear of what he planned to cause. He turned to stare down the machine, willing it to charge. It came bursting forward with surprising speed. Mighty waited until it was almost on top of them, then slammed the wall as hard as he could with his good arm.

"NOW!" he roared. Sonic took off like a bullet from a gun, bringing Mighty with him as the ceiling collapsed on the drill bot with a deafening roar.

"You think that stopped it?" Sonic asked once they had cleared the fall zone and caught up to Rob and the rest.

Mighty shook his head. "Listen," he said. The rumbling continued as the machine bored through the earth towards them. "But that's okay, because I only needed to slow it down.

He walked back to the edge of the cave in, retrieving his half buried club on the way. As soon as the metal tip of the drill poked through Mighty tossed the flashlight to Sonic and swung the steel beam with both hands. The tip of the drill crumpled slightly before deflecting the beam. Mighty swung it again and again, landing blow after ringing blow, until the drill could no longer spin. The beam was gouged and disfigured from the attack, but it had done the job. The machine started to retreat, but Mighty grabbed it by the ruined drill and dug his heels in. He started to slide. Suddenly, as he wrenched at the thing to keep it from escaping, the drill came free entirely, leaving the chassis open to attack by Sonic, who put half a dozen dents in it in about the same time it took a person to blink.

When they were sure the machine would stay were it was, blocking that tunnel from further excavation, they made their way back to the main cavern to try another tunnel. Sonic was headed for his original tunnel on the right when the whine of a drill and the roar of a high powered engine alerted him to imminent danger. He rolled well clear of the entrance as another drill car burst into the cavern.

"Watch out for the acid!" Somebody shouted as they all scattered to avoid being reduced to goop by the venomous stream that the machine sprayed.

In the openness of the cavern the drill car was much less threatening than in the confines of the tunnel. Sonic could see, when whoever had the flashlight now was training it on the car, that it was in fact equipped with acid turrets and drills on both ends. He quickly took it upon himself to render all four turrets nonfunctional, then set about attacking the opaque Plexiglas covering the presumable cockpit.

The machine crashed into one of the columns as Mighty slammed into it from the side, collapsing it. Sonic jumped off as the hunks of stone rained down on the cockpit covering, which, already severely cracked from Sonic's assault, gave way under their weight. Mighty jammed the remains of his steel club into the treads for good measure as the engine sputtered and died, then made a new one from the pile. They mopped up the Egg Robos that came streaming out of the left hand tunnel to assist the drill car, then headed down that selfsame tunnel. Sonic wondered what had taken them so long to join the fray, but he decided it didn't really matter. Any mistakes Robotnik had made in programming their combat protocols, a phrase he had learned from the doctor himself, was just good luck for Sonic.

"Hey, could somebody shine the flashlight back over here?" Ray asked abruptly. Johnny obliged him, revealing a circular hole in the wall perhaps four feet across in the wall behind the young squirrel.

"I saw it last time you pointed the light this direction," Ray said by way of explanation as everyone crowded into the space to investigate it.

"Huh," Sonic said, walking along the interior of the smaller tunnel and brushing his fingers against the wall, "I wonder what Robotnik's doing with this one?"

"I don't think Robotnik's responsible for this," Johnny replied. "It looks more like the tunnel he was digging intersected with a natural one. Look," He pointed the light to the far wall of the larger tunnel, "it continues on that side."

"Are you sure?" Sonic asked. "It looks pretty straight to be natural. I think we should check it out."

"It looks like a lava tunnel to me," Johnny shrugged, but he and the others followed Sonic deeper into the tunnel nonetheless.

Mighty didn't hear the telltale sounds of the drill car until it was too late.

"Back, back!" he shouted, but before they could reach the main tunnel a drill car had already arrived and blocked them into the lava tube. Mighty threw his club as it sprayed acid at them. The action saved their lives. The club intercepted the brunt of the spray, deflected most of the rest to the walls, and smashed one of the turrets before it melted to a puddle of goop. Mighty bit his tongue to keep from screaming as a couple of drops ate through his glove and burned the back of his hand. They turned and fled down the tunnel as the drilled bored through earth and stone in pursuit of them.

"How deep do you think we are?" Sonic asked when they stopped to take a breather an hour or so later. The drill was pursuing relentlessly, but slowly, and for now they had left it far behind, a dull rumble in the distance. So far they had discovered no branches to the tunnel, just miles of straight rock tube. In places it angled down until they were almost climbing instead of walking, although at the moment they were on a level stretch.

"I dunno," Mighty replied, "pretty deep. Is it just me, or is it getting hotter?"

"I think so," Rob replied. Another approximate half mile confirmed this, as the heat became more and more oppressive. Then the tunnel dead ended with a cave-in.

"Oh no..." Matt said, surveying the choking pile of rocks dismally, "we're trapped." He sat down

and put his head in his hands.

"How deep do you think it goes?" Mighty asked, eyeing it dubiously.

"Could be a few feet, could be that there isn't any tunnel on the other side at all," Johnny replied grimly. "Doesn't much matter, we're stuck either way."

"Not if I can help it," Mighty said. "I'm not waiting here for the drill to catch us." He began tearing rocks off the pile with feverish energy, forcing the others to backpedal out of the way of the debris he created.

"Mighty!" Johnny shouted over the noise of his excavation, "Watch what you're doing, or you'll bring the whole thing down on top of us!"

"Which will be worse than waiting for the drill how?" Mighty called back. "Better this than the other option."

Nobody argued with that. Twenty minutes of frenzied digging later, Mighty was still pulling rocks off a pile that seemed just as solid as it had at the beginning, even if he had pushed it several yards back. The rumbling of the drill was growing steadily louder, heralding its inexorable approach. It was still some ways back, but quickly drawing nearer. A gust of hot air accompanied a momentary flicker of light as Mighty moved another rock and the pile shifted, then was lost again.

"You better find the other side soon," Sonic announced, returning from further up the tunnel. "It's less than a half mile away and gaining!"

"I think I'm almost there!" Mighty replied, fervently hoping he wasn't just imagining things. A minute later his fist burst through a tiny a hole at the top of the pile and encountered empty air. Red light and heat poured through. He kept digging. There was a sharp crack as stone on the far side of the pile cracked and fell, closing up the little hole he had made. He had no idea how much, but it sounded like quite a bit had slid in to fill the gap.

"Five hundred yards!" Sonic said. Mighty cursed and began digging with frenetic energy.

"Three hundred!" He found the light again, then lost it, then found it.

"Two hundred!" He enlarged the hole until it was the size of his head.

"One hundred!" Big enough. Ray slipped through, followed by Matt, Johnny, and Rob. Sonic went next, spinning to dislodge himself as his quills caught. Fortunately it widened the hole enough to let Mighty through. The drill was maybe a fifty yards behind them when he tumbled out on the other side. Less than a minute.

The far side of the cave-in let out into a large rock chamber, an intact section of a much larger tunnel that had collapsed at some point in the past from the looks of it. A narrow, crumbling ledge protruded from their entrance, then ended abruptly in a very long drop to a bubbling river of lava below. Even some hundred feet above it the heat was stultifying. The shelf was maybe twelve feet wide directly in front of the tunnel mouth, but it tapered to nothing in a quick few yards to either side. That was lucky, had it been too much less they'd have gone sailing off the side and into the lava below in their hurry to escape. They had maybe forty five seconds to come up with a plan. It didn't take that much thought.

Sonic positioned himself at the edge of the ledge, as confident as ever.

"Come on, you dumb hunk of metal, take the bait," he said, grinning as the drill broke through the mouth of the tunnel. The rest of the machine soon followed. Sonic vaulted over the drill onto the top of the machine as it tried to ram him off the cliff. Unfortunately, its momentum wasn't enough to carry it over the edge, and it stopped there, drill ponderously whirring in empty space. Mighty leapt forward and punched the ground where it was already cracking under the weight of the machine, then grabbed the treads and heaved. A substantial section of ledge crumbled and gave way, and Sonic flipped off the drill car as it toppled into the lava below. They all scrambled for the tunnel as the rest of the ledge began to collapse.

Matt, Rob, and Johnny all made it safely, and worked together to pull Mighty in. Sonic, naturally, was in the tunnel before anyone else could even move. Mighty groaned in terror as he saw the earth beneath Ray's feet give way, but instead of falling with a terrified wail to the waiting lava as Mighty expected, Ray leapt into the air, spread his skin flaps, and used the thermals coming off the lava below to glide to the safety of the tunnel mouth.

"Oh man," Mighty said, sighing with relief. "I thought you were a goner for a second there."

Ray laughed, "That was so cool!"


	5. Chapter 5

Dokan ambled to and fro attending to the large variety of tasks that needed their attention. Candles and torches were placed carefully on the cave walls to provide some amount of light to the otherwise very dark room. In the next cave over some children played while their mothers did their best to keep the others in good spirits.

"General Prower sir!" a small but stout mouse said, saluting. "One of the scouts just came back!"

A tall fox with a disciplined bearing, wearing a blue military uniform turned around to face the mouse. A rapier rested at his hip, and his left eye was covered with a black patch. "At ease, lieutenant. What's the report?"

The scout, a squirrel with dark brown fatigues, nodded and began. "Sir, I went to the village to find Matt and the others, and sure enough, there was a struggle of some kind. And… I found a big bot with a ball and chain, and it was destroyed."

General Prower raised an eyebrow. "That is intriguing," he said. "Anything else?"

"It seemed like there might be tracks leading away from the village, but I can't be sure; like someone was heading for the Marble Garden entrance to the caves."

Prower's brow wrinkled in thought. "Hm…" The others looked at him for guidance. "Alright men! I want an extra watch posted in the southern tunnel, and prep the noncombatants for evacuation."

The squirrel and mouse both looked at him in shock. "Evacuation, sir?" the mouse asked. "You really think Robotnik's found us?"

"I'm not sure, but tracks leading into the Marble Garden are certainly not a good sign," Prower said. "And with all that rumbling we've been hearing, it's almost certain he's been looking. Once we get the civilians out, we'll cover our tracks and make for the backup rendezvous point. We'll stage our offensive from there. Any questions?"

"Yeah," a youthful voice said, prompting Prower to turn around. "Were you really going to leave us behind?"

Prower's one good eye widened in shock when he saw a blue hedgehog standing in front of him. "Sonic! What are you doing here?"

"Oh you know," Sonic began, "running around, destroying bots. That sort of thing."

General Prower grabbed Sonic by the shoulders. "Is there anyone else with you? Have you seen Matt, Johnny or Rob?" Prower chastened himself and let go.

"Uh… yes, and yes," Sonic answered. He pointed to one of the entrances to the cave. "They're on their way. Should be here soon actually."

Just then one of Prower's scouts ran into the cave from the direction Sonic had indicated. "General! They're back!" Behind the scout strode Matt and the others.

"Reporting for duty sir!" Matt called out.

"Ah, thank goodness!" Prower said. "We were almost ready to leave without you. The bots are getting too close for comfort."

"Oh, we've got some stories to tell," Mighty said. Prower raised an eyebrow at that.

"I'm sure you do," he said. "Please, start with your escape from Robotnik's lab. I'm very curious about that."

"Eh, that wasn't so hard," Sonic said. "Mighty bashed down a few doors, I cut a few badniks in half; it was simple."

Prower looked at Mighty. "Bashing down doors?"

"He's amazing," Matt interjected. "They both are. Mighty's ten times stronger than he was before, and you almost can't see Sonic he goes so fast. And Ray's a sneaky little thing apparently." Ray shrugged.

Prower's eye was wide. "That… that is wonderful. Are you boys ready to strike back at Robotnik?"

"I was hoping you'd say something like that," Sonic said with a smirk, slamming a fist into his other hand. "So what's the plan?"

"We're planning a strike on Robotnik's main fortress," Prower replied. "That's where he has the largest amount of prisoners."

"Where else does he have them?" Mighty asked. Prower sighed.

"He has one more prisoner at the lab that he took you three to," Prower said sullenly. Sonic and Mighty looked confused.

"Who?" Sonic asked. "We never saw anybody else."

"My son, Miles," Prower said quietly. "He was moved recently, so perhaps he wasn't put in the same cells as you yet."

"Not a problem," Sonic said casually. "We'll just zip back and get him."

"It's not that simple, lad," Matt said. "We don't have enough people to split up and still get everyone at the larger complex out safely."

"We'll get my son if we can," Prower said, "but he's not as big of a priority than the larger group at the fortress. I just… I just pray that Robotnik does not harm him as punishment for our actions." Prower hung his head.

"No," Sonic said, more serious than he was before. "We can do both; I'll do both. Start getting everyone ready to evacuate. Mighty will make sure that everyone's safe. Meanwhile, I'll rescue the prisoners, and then I'm getting your son."

"What?" Prower asked incredulously. "You can't go alone; it's far too dangerous! Robotnik will recapture you for sure."

"Robotnik won't even see me coming," Sonic said. Before General Prower could say anything else, he was gone.

"Don't worry sir," Mighty said. "If anyone can do this, it's Sonic." Prower cleared his throat, and stood up straight.

"Then let's not waste this opportunity," he said, sounding more like his usual self. "We proceed as planned. If Sonic is as amazing as he seems, we just might pull this off."

Sonic raced through the tunnels, occasionally passing the remains of an egg-robo or a bundle of rocks that had become dislodged from the tunnel wall. He focused on one thing: Robotnik, and making sure that he would pay for what he'd done to Sonic's home, for what he'd done to the people he'd captured, and what he might be doing right now to Prower's son.

Sonic left the tunnel, and skidded to a stop in the clearing he and the others had been in only recently. In front of him were a few egg-robos cleaning up scrap metal from the earlier fight, as well as a group of gunners. Sonic narrowed his eyes.

"Raah!" he yelled, dashing towards the nearest gunner, curling into a razor-sharp ball and jumping through its middle. He hit the ground and bounced into the air before curling back into a ball and slamming down on another, crushing its torso. He flew through the air at another, knocking it to the ground, and then he landed and rolled, cutting the bot in half. The final gunner was about to attack when Sonic dashed forward and knocked its head off with a strong speed-powered kick.

He glanced at the egg-robos, who had barely even reacted to his presence. Some seemed shocked while others were reaching for their weapons as quickly as they could. Before any of them could fire with their guns, Sonic had curled into a ball and sliced through them all.

Sonic sighed. "I feel better already." He surveyed the wreckage, satisfied with his work, and then sped off into the forest.

While he ran, zigzagging around trees and hopping over fallen logs, he could occasionally see a surprised egg-robo or buzzbomber. That was fine; he couldn't really care if Robotnik knew he was coming, because Sonic was ready to fight back.

He also thought about Prower's son. His parents called him Miles, but Sonic and everyone else he knew usually called him Tails, because he had two tails. That was probably why Robotnik had him separated in the first place; because even if he couldn't run super fast or lift a ton, those two tails meant that he was special enough.

In short order Sonic could begin to see Robotnik's fortress in the distance. He grimaced at the tall, nondescript structure its cold, menacing, steel façade. Except for a few patrolling gunners, however, Sonic could not see any defenses. Still he decided to look around for a way in before rushing straight in.

He veered to the right, and spotted the main door. Surprisingly, it was open, though Sonic could not see any reason why. Whatever the reason, Sonic had his way in.

He sped forward, and could see the patrol gunners finally notice him. They began to fire, and turned to dispatch them. He sped up to an even greater velocity, and destroyed the first with the sheer power of the sonic boom that had built up around him. Another gunner turned the corner and had its head taken off with a well-placed jump before it could react.

Sonic ran all around the fortress, destroying the gunners as they appeared. Finally, he reached the other side, finding the door still open, and ran in. Inside he was greeted with what looked like an entry hall, significantly more plush and welcoming than the stark and lifeless exterior. Glancing left and right, Sonic saw video screens displaying robot greeters talking up the wonders of Robotnik's facility.

"…where you will be treated to three square meals a day, courtesy of our fully automated kitchen staff," a humanoid robot promised on nearly a dozen identical screens.

"Why would he still be sweet-talking them once he's already got them in the building?" Sonic wondered aloud.

"Sweet talking nothing!" the robot on the screen retorted, causing Sonic to jump. "Everything I say is true. The good doctor's guests are treated to more-than adequate room and board."

"While he puts them in work camps and experiments on them!" Sonic shot back. The robot puts its hands on its hips.

"The price they pay for the services rendered," it said. "You can't expect the doctor to give such things away for free, do you?"

Sonic narrowed his eyes and growled. "Aaah!" he yelled as he smashed his fist into the video screen. It splintered and cracked from the impact of his fist.

"What were you hoping to accomplish with that little maneuver?" the robot asked, sighing. "I'm afraid that you aren't going to be easy to convince."

Suddenly, a gun turret appeared above every video screen, and the front door closed with a thoom. "Not to worry," the robot continued, "they're just stun blasters. Your safety is our utmost concern."

Before the first turret could fire Sonic had leapt into the air and cleaved it in two. Then he pushed off from the wall and destroyed its opposite. He bounced back and forth destroying the turrets before a stray bolt caught him on his spines, sending him crashing to the ground, where a well-timed curl and roll barely saved him from a hard fall. He quickly started moving to avoid being hit again while he rubbed his spines as they were now quite numb.

Only three turrets were left. He quickly leapt into the air above one and landed on top. Once the other turrets had figured out where he was, they tried to blast him and instead overloaded his perch when he leapt away. He came down with a hard kick on another and sent it careening to the floor. Now there was only one left. It got off one shot before it was left smoking and useless. The feeling was coming back in his spines.

"Very impressive Sonic," an organic voice said, sounding like it was coming from the video screens. Robotnik. He had replaced the robot on every undamaged screen. "Besides snippets that my cameras at the lab caught, I haven't had a chance to see you in action since you've 'gone wild,' so to speak. I'm impressed; you're really coming into your own."

"Save it doc," Sonic retorted. "I'm not your test subject anymore, and neither are the other people you've taken. Let them go."

"But why?" Robotnik asked. "They came here of their own free will. All I ask is that they stay until I can be sure that whatever nasty bug they've caught is taken care of."

"That you probably gave them!" Sonic countered.

"Well," Robotnik continued, "if I somehow inadvertently gave them a disease, I would certainly want to make sure that it doesn't happen to my furry little friends again, wouldn't I?" Sonic simply glared at him.

"Alright fine, hedgehog!" Robotnik barked, turning nasty. "You're going to stop this nonsense and come back to the lab, you spine-headed beast, or I'll make you. You are an insignificant nothing that isn't worthy of my time, but if you continue to resist me, I will personally kill you once you have outlived your usefulness. Are we clear?"

Sonic stood still for a moment. "Sure thing doc," he said casually. "Let them go and get off the island, and I'll think about going easy on you. Is that cool?" Robotnik narrowed his eyes and disappeared, all of the video screens going dark.

Suddenly the door at the far end of the hall opened and and a group of gunners, egg-robos and buzzbombers streamed out. Sonic didn't give them a chance to react, dashing forward and bouncing off a buzzbomber into the next room. He noticed a control panel and quickly slammed his foot into it, crashing the door down on top of one of the egg-robos and nearly cleaving it in two.

"Smell ya later!" Sonic teased as he turned and starting running. He figured that the prisoners would probably be in the center of the fortress, so as to make it harder for them to escape. As he ran, he could occasionally hear a door open behind him, and robots file out, ordering him to halt. Suddenly he came upon a closed door and stopped.

"Hm…" Sonic said to himself. "How do I open this sucker?" He pressed a button on a control panel to the left of the door.

"Level 4 clearance required," a female sounding electric voice said. "Present ID chip for entry."

"Uh…" Sonic didn't know what to do, and he could hear bots coming up behind him.

"Halt!" another electronic voice said, this time from behind him. He turned to see a roughly circular bot with two arms and a glowing red eye floating in the air behind him. "This area is off limits."

Sonic leapt in the air and sent the bot crashing to the ground. Then he had an idea, dragging it over to the control panel. A scanner looked at the bot and beeped. "ID chip accepted," the control panel voice said. And with that, the door opened. Sonic sped through, seeing some robots appearing from behind coming after him. They began firing as the door closed.

Sonic was immediately assaulted by an array of laser bolts. A pair of gunners and two more of the flying red-eyed bots were coming towards him, the red-eyes yelling at him. He quickly dispatched a gunner, and then noticed that the hallway he was now in was both perpendicular to the one he had been in previously and cured towards the center of the fortress in both directions.

Lost in his thoughts, Sonic was shocked when on of the red-eyes grabbed his arms from behind. "You will be escorted back to your quarters," it said as it lifted him into the air.

"Ugh! Let me go!" Sonic protested. He tried to kick it and, failing that, flexed his spines, stiffening them, and began nodding rapidly, effectively mimicking a buzz saw.

"Cease ac-action!" it said, starting to twitch and shake. Finally Sonic felt its grip loosed and he fell to the ground. The red-eye hit the floor with a crash right behind him.

He then leapt in the air and bounced off the other red-eye so that it flew towards the remaining gunner, sending them both crashing to the ground. The gunner threw off the useless red-eye and was about to stand up when Sonic blazed through its head.

The door he had come through previously opened and robots poured through, so Sonic started to run, leaving them far behind. He occasionally passed a red-eye or gunner that could not react in time and therefore missed him completely. He was running so fast that he skidded to a halt when the words "Cell Block" caught his eye.

The hallway opened up into a larger area. To the right was another hall, probably twenty meters long, with "Cell Block" on the far wall. Standing in front of the door was a roughly humanoid robot. It had short arms and legs, with weapons attachments and large feet. Instead of a head, there was a large glass bubble in its chest through which Sonic could see an egg-robo pilot. It came to life and stood up straighter, preparing to attack.

Sonic smiled slyly. "Bring it on."


	6. Chapter 6

The robot brought two very large and ominous looking guns to bear on Sonic's location. Or at least that's what it was in the middle of doing when he hurtled through the air and smashed the Plexiglas cockpit, the egg robo within, and the delicate machinery behind it, bouncing off to land on his feet as it staggered back into the wall with a satisfying thump before collapsing in a shower of sparks.

"Sorry 'buttnik," Sonic said, "I don't have time to play with your toys right now." He shook a few loose shards of glass out of his quills and strode purposefully to the door labeled cellblock. To his surprise, it opened without protest, as he approached, letting him through into facility's heart. The walls of the large room were lined with cells, all full crammed full of… absolutely nothing.

"Huh?" Sonic queried, as the door slammed shut behind him with a very decisive boom, "Where is everybody?"

"They're not here, you miserable little buffoon!" Robotnik's disembodied voice cried in mocking triumph, pouring out of some unseen speaker, "They're all on a barge headed for my facilities on the western side of the archipelago, and now you're trapped here, with your idiotic friends in Prower's self styled resistance soon to walk into the selfsame trap!" The vindictiveness in that voice made Sonic's skin crawl. How could he have called this man a friend less than three days ago?

"That's nice, doc," he replied, refusing to let Robotnik's taunts get beneath his skin and shatter his nonchalance, "But what makes you think I'm going to stay put?"

"You have very little choice in the matter without your armadillo friend to open my doors for you!"

"Guess again. Shouldn't have left me in a room with so much space to run, doc!"

Sonic had neither Mighty's strength nor any of the Doctor's numerous degrees in physics, quantum, mundane, and otherwise, but he did possess a very practical understanding of momentum in action. You don't have to be terribly strong to break things. You just need to hit them with enough speed. In a span of less than two seconds he had circled the room several times and hammered all four corners of the steel door out of shape. A final spindash to the exact center ripped it right out the frame, screaming metallic protest as it landed with a bang in the hallway. Alarm klaxons blared. Sonic was already beginning to associate that noise with parties, specifically parties of the violent, robot-demolishing kind.

Sure enough, the hallway outside was full of robots. They opened fire, the lasers obscured in the identical flashing crimson of the alarm lights, but Sonic was already in the air again, spinning with preternatural speed. The confined space limited his ability to run, stripping away the advantage of being able to leave them all behind, but he used it to his advantage, bouncing around like a deadly avenging pinball of sheer frenetic energy. Steel automatons crumpled like so many toys smashed by a bowling ball. The heavy bulkhead doors at the end of the hallway, built to resist a hit from a rocket launcher, as though the citizens of the Southern Islands had any such ordinance, provided a bit of a workout, but were simply not up to withstanding repeated hammerings at that velocity. Sonic repeated the rapid process of scrapping anything that moved in the next hallway and blew threw the next set of doors into a third, to find yet more guns leveled at his face. The Doctor had to be running out of robots by this point, even if there were still a few rooms between himself and the outside left to put them in. If he wasn't, he would be by the time Sonic knocked the last door off its hinges.

Sonic stopped midway through his assault and battery of the next door, halted by a nagging sensation. It wasn't quite a buzzing in the air, but something off to the left was calling to be investigated. The way out was to continue forward, back the way he had come in. Robotnik's personal labs and control rooms were presumably the only thing he would discover in the other direction, if this base was designed along the same lines as the other. Robotnik himself wouldn't even be there, would he? Truthfully, Sonic was never really sure where the man was unless they were physically in the same room. The doctor was very fond of view screens and public announcement systems. Possibly he was just used to having to communicate over long distances, more probably he genuinely preferred it to real human interaction.

"All right doc," Sonic muttered, making up his mind to batter down the obstacles in the left hand corridor and forge deeper into the base, "I'm coming for you."

At the worst, he reasoned, picking himself up after yet another door, Robotnik wouldn't be there, but he could still wreck some of his stuff and dissuade Robotnik from returning the place. That is, he thought a bit unsteadily, if his head survived knocking down all the solid metal objects on the way there. He shook the offending concern off, both physically and mentally, and proceeding battering his way inward. Besides, whatever was calling to him was insistent. Fortunately, the next room contained half a dozen rings, spinning in circular formation a few inches off the floor. Sonic scooped them up and felt all the minor cuts, scrapes, bruises and burns he'd accumulated just disappear along with his general weariness, like they'd never been there at all. Rejuvenated, he proceeding to smash every important looking piece of machinery in the room, and some not so important looking ones as well, terminals, monitors, loudspeakers, everything.

Satisfied that all the breakables in the room had been sufficiently trashed, Sonic proceeded into the next set of connected rooms, which proved to be, as near as he could reckon, a series of interconnected labs of various types. Why exactly Robotnik needed so many was beyond him, perhaps he was in the habit of performing several experiments simultaneously, or perhaps all his bases were built on a model that prepared for every eventual possibility, or perhaps he simply favored redundant architecture as a defense against accidents. Whatever the reason, Sonic set to smashing with a will. He stopped long enough in one of the rooms to allow Robotnik to come online on a as yet intact view screen to address him.

"Where are you going, rodent?" snarled the doctor, "I thought you were escaping. The exit is in the other direction."

"I figured I'd junk some of your toys first," Sonic replied, a savage undertone belying the rather cocky nature of the remark, "And maybe if I'm really lucky I'll find you and we'll get to see a scrambled egghead."

"No chance of that, you little spike swine. I'm afraid you won't find me at this facility."

Lacking a suitably witty retort, Sonic settled for smashing the screen and everything else in the room, including a few robots that stumbled in. Most of the remainder was, Sonic guessed, probably guarding the passage outward to prevent him from escaping, and thus had no interest in pursuing him as he moved away from the exit and toward the interior.

Upon leaving the room he was greeted with an intersection, a tiny hallway connecting, he assumed, this lab with three others hidden behind the identical doors. So, Sonic thought, three choices, none of them presenting a particularly strong case to pick that one over the others. The answer was, of course, all of them. He was going to tear this place down, and that meant he'd be getting to all of them eventually… but where to start? Seeing no reason to go left or right, he abandoned his brief indecision and decided to continue forward. The nagging feeling seemed to be pulling him in that direction anyway.

"Let's see what's behind door number one!" Sonic had, in his brief stay as a guest at Robotnik's facilities, watched some human television programs. The space operas had been his favorite, but the game show phrase seemed more appropriate.

As it turned out, there were three gold rings in the middle of a large room filled with computers. Robotnik liked computers; every lab came equipped with a terminal, probably to save the fat scientist the trouble of walking any great distance to record important breakthroughs. The computers in this room, however, were something more than that, taking up much of one wall with great monitors and massive, specially cooled processing towers. This was not the greatest computer in his possession, if the fat man's boasting was anything to be believed, not even close. Robotnik kept his most prized technologies somewhere far away, in his great laboratories in the near mythical human lands. It was, however, almost certainly the central computer for this facility, and quite probably computational overkill for anything less than real time rendering of distortions in the space-time continuum. Not that Sonic understood what that meant in more than the vaguest sense, but Robotnik said it like it was something very impressive indeed. Sonic smashed it without a second thought, pausing only to briefly glance at the log on the one active monitor. Something about recovering the contents of another emerald chamber beneath the marble ruins before the mining units all went offline.

Satisfied that the computer was totaled, he looked around the room for his next target, and settled on bashing down the door on the left side of the room with a quick spindash. The room on the other side appeared to be a glorified walk-in storage closet. Of course, considering the doctor's physical girth and the girth of his ego a glorified walk-in closet meant a room with no less square footage than the house Sonic had grown up in. It was mostly empty, containing a few esoteric bits of machinery whose purposes Sonic could only guess at. Robotnik wasn't the type to bother much with storage. He tended to build redundant copies of anything he might need or want and have them easily available at convenient locations to avoid having to look around for whatever he need, or travel any great distance to retrieve it. Mostly he just hoarded data, and even that could be accessed from numerous locations, protected by passwords and firewalls rather than locks and doors.

What caught Sonic's attention, though, was the glowing cyan gem resting serenely in its glass case atop some sort of miniature steel tower. He recognized it as a Chaos Emerald, although not the same one Robotnik had used during his experiments. That one had been purple. Color discrepancy aside, the two were identical, flawless brilliant cuts the size of a human fist. Sonic had heard a number of the legends surrounding the Chaos Emeralds. Collecting seven of them was supposed to give you unlimited power, and possessing even one… well possessing one did something, maybe, for some people. The legends were often contradictory about who could do what with them. Sometimes it was anybody who picked them up, sometimes it was only the chosen ones. Chosen by whom was rarely stated. The gods maybe, or the Emeralds themselves. Some said they were self-aware. Some said they were made by the gods, or the embodiments of nature, or artifacts created by a long lost civilization. They could power mystic technology, allow one to fly, take you anywhere in an instant, grant wishes, control time, wipe out armies in blinding flashes of light, raise the dead. They could do anything and everything. Robotnik had at least two. Clearly, letting him keep them would be bad.

Sonic stepped forward to punch the glass. It was at waist level for Robotnik, which meant he had to reach up to do so. Not only did his fist not break the glass, but the tower shocked him with an extremely powerful electric jolt. Fortunately, he jerked back involuntarily as the shock hit him, and fell out of the tower's short range, breaking the circuit. Sonic snarled and flung himself at it in a spindash. There was a tinkling sound as the glass shattered and the emerald fell to the floor with a clank. Another klaxon sounded, but it just elaborated on the melody of alarm already ringing through the base. Sonic shook himself off and picked the emerald up. He could feel the power in the thing. It was like the boost he got from grabbing the golden rings, only this was like getting a hundred of them at once, and something more, too. He suspected that no amount of rings would ever substitute for this gem. There was something qualitatively different about the power, although he couldn't put his finger on it. Then it disappeared, absorbed into his body. Sonic found this mildly unsettling, but not that odd, given that the golden rings he so often grabbed did exactly the same thing.

Energized by the emerald, Sonic tore through the base like wildfire, smashing as he went, heedless of the remaining robots. Nothing could even slow him down. It was as if the emerald had coated him a protective aura even as it charged him with energy. All in all, it took him considerably less than half an hour from the time he arrived to gut the base and escape. Of course, that was without rescuing the other villagers, so no matter how quick he had been, he was still wasting time. He stopped outside the base to consider where to go next. Robotnik had said they were on a barge, one of his big transport boats, so they were out over the water. That was a problem, because Sonic couldn't swim. He could run on water, true, but he didn't think he could do so indefinitely. If the barge were close enough to see he could probably reach it, though… He was about to take off when he noticed a familiar figure in the distance.

"Mighty!" he said, covering the half mile between them in approximately three seconds, "What are you doing here?"

"I came to help you break into Robotnik's fortress," the red armadillo replied, panting slightly. Mighty was in good shape, but he was not a long distance runner of Sonic's caliber. "I thought you could use-"

"I already took care of it." Sonic interrupted, "Place was empty. Robotnik put them on a barge. I'm gonna go run around the island and see if I can spot it. Bye!"

Mighty tried to yell something, but he was already out of earshot.

Sonic made his way along the coast, which was largely flat beach, kicking up an impressive trail of sand and checking the ocean for large boats. He had gone less than a quarter of the way around when he spotted it, a mile or two out. It was a long way to run on water, but nothing he didn't think he could handle. He took off across the water at top speed. Thankfully, it was a balmy morning with only a light breeze, and the only major wave action came from the wake of the ship, which was moving at a good clip. This he avoided with ease, sending up a spray that caught the light of the morning sun and shimmered with a fantastic rainbow. The ship was a tall, thick-sided functional metal piece. It was a transport barge, clean and serviceable but not designed with aesthetics foremost in mind. Sonic ran a wide circle around it, looking for a ladder or door or any sort of access to the forbiddingly high deck. Seeing none, he decided to take the only available course of action, and ran straight up the side.

He was met t the top with a pack of egg robos, who voiced a robotic chorus of "priority one hedgehog, neutralize" and leveled their blasters in his face. It was the last mistake they ever made. Sonic reduced every robot on deck to scattered piles of scrap metal, then made his way below decks, utilizing the same pinball technique he had in the base to clear the cramped stairway of bots.

The ship had multiple levels of decks, and Sonic found most of the rooms, halls, and stairways connecting them alarmingly and eerily empty. Twice he rounded corners and was nearly surprised by egg robos, but in both instances hedgehog reflexes proved superior to computerized ones. Finally, deep in the bowels of the ship he discovered what he was looking for.

The residents of South Island's largest, and truthfully, only village who had not escaped to the caves huddled in a series of barred cells, scared and miserable, guarded by a trio of Egg Robos. The robots and villagers became aware of Sonic's presence at about the same time, that is to say, when he smashed the former into tiny sparking pieces.

"Just hold on everybody," Sonic said as he somersaulted off the last egg robo, the only one that had had time to utter "priority" before he caved its domed mechanical head in, "Stand back from the doors, and I'll have you all out in a second!"

The barred doors were held shut with fairly simple locks. They were solidly constructed steel affairs, to be sure, but in a few seconds Sonic had spindashed around the room and hammered every single one wide open. Dokan flooded out, surrounded him, babbling questions and relief.

"Sonic!" he recognized the speaker, Fiona, a red fox about his own age, "What are you doing here?" Several of the others echoed the sentiment, many more were too busy just trying to congratulate him.

"Well," he said, engaging in rapid fire handshaking and try to avoid being engulfed by the swarm of people trying to pull him into hugs, "I'm breaking you guys out."

"Sorry," Fiona shook her head, "What I meant was, how did you get here? We're on a boat in the middle of the ocean."

"I ran. It isn't that far from shore."

"You what?"

"I ran. On the water. I can do that now, it's pretty cool." A murmur ran through the crowd. Not disbelief, exactly, but incredulity perhaps, and certainly awe.

"I see," Fiona said, blinking, "So how do we get off?"

"Oh," Sonic replied, "Um, I guess we can drive it to shore. Anybody know where the steering wheel is?"

After several minutes of scouring the ship, Sonic, with several islanders in tow, finally kicked down the door to the cabin to find a pair of Egg Robos piloting the ship. If the robots were surprised to find a mutiny taking place aboard their barge, they didn't get a chance to show it before Sonic dismantled them in his singular fashion, much to the appreciation of the crowd.

Unfortunately, the ship's internal computer was not as cooperative as Sonic had expected, and it took particular offense to the destruction of its robotic pilots.

"Pilot to ship link interrupted," a female voice dictated as the same words flashed on the screen "Dr Robotnik, please reattach pilot and enter code to resume navigation program, or swipe keycard to engage manual override."

"So..." someone in the crowd asked, "How do you use it?"

"I dunno," Sonic replied, "Mighty stole the last boat. I guess I better go ask him."


	7. Chapter 7

"So he said they were on a barge somewhere and took off again," Mighty told General Prower as he led the army toward the speedboat he, Sonic and Ray had escaped from Robotnik's base in.

"Do you think he can really rescue them?" the older fox asked. The dark circles under his eyes had been evident even in the poorly lit caves, but they really stood out in the morning sunlight. Those circles were more than just the result of a sleepless night organizing an army of fishermen into an army of soldiers. They were more than the result of a harrowing brush with death. They belonged to the eyes of a man whose wife and child had been taken away from him because he was too weak to protect them, because he had to think of the families of everyone under his command, not just his own. There was guilt in those eyes, and grief beyond words. Grief was not the only thing in Amadeus Prower's eyes, though. There was strength, too; strength, and a glimmer of hope.

The General's attitude was reflected in his army, if one could really call it an army. Most of the inhabitants of the South Islands had come at one time another to escape some sort of conflict on the mainland, or had been born of parents who came to escape conflict. They were fishermen and farmers and craftspeople. Amadeus was the only one among them who had ever been a military officer, as far as Mighty knew, and only a few of the remainder had ever been enlisted. They were poorly trained, ill equipped, and their organization was mediocre at best. However, if they lacked the accoutrements and discipline of a professional army, they still had the spirit. These were people fighting to defend their homes and families from soulless metallic invaders, and if they had seemed broken when he first saw them beneath the marble ruins, they were also a people who had just been given hope, and he was one of the ones giving it to them.

"Knowing Sonic, he probably already has, and if he hasn't he will pretty soon" Mighty replied. He didn't want to paint an overly optimistic picture, but he had faith in the Hedgehog. Who wouldn't, after seeing what Mighty had seen.

"Look what he did to the base," Mighty continued, "It took him what, twenty, twenty five minutes to get here, break down all the doors and leave? I know he was fast before, but you haven't really seen him in action since the change. I have, and what I saw was nothing but a blue blur. Blink once, and you'll miss him. Robotnik's machines don't have a chance."

"I only hope he can rescue my son before Robotnik does anything to him…" Amadeus sighed.

"I'm sure Tai… Miles will be fine," Mighty said, remembering to use the cub's proper name in front of his father, "Sonic will… heh, speak of the devil."

Mighty was the first to spot the dust cloud in the distance, but only by a millisecond. Alarmed cries went up, was it some new war machine come for them?

Sonic skidded to a halt in front of them, breaking his momentum with an elaborate flourish and throwing up a rather larger spray of dirt than Mighty thought was strictly necessary. Mighty wondered how his shoes took all the punishment. Robotnik might be evil, but he could certainly design a pair of sneakers.

"Hey guys," Sonic said, grinning and flicking a two-fingered salute to General Prower, "Hello Mr. Prower."

"Did you find it?" Mighty asked.

"Yep, but I don't know how to drive it. Says I need a password or something. Since you stole the last one I figured you might know how to deal with it." Sonic replied, a slight edge to his voice belying the otherwise casual tones. Sonic was impatient, but not with boredom, Mighty realized. No, Sonic had people depending on him, and he didn't intend to keep them waiting. Mighty bit back the sarcastic reply he had been preparing.

"Ray was the one responsible for stealing the last boat, but I think you're looking for this," he said, pulling the doctor's keycard out his glove, "That's what I was trying to give you earlier," He couldn't resist adding the last bit. It was entirely true, and Sonic just running off like that had been a tad annoying.

"Okay, cool." Sonic said, swiping it out of Mighty's fingers. He started to run off, but this time Mighty was ready. He caught Sonic by the arm, and his own was nearly jerked out of its socket by the hedgehog's acceleration.

"Ow, jeez, what was that for?" Sonic said, stopping a rubbing his own shoulder with his free hand.

"Hold up for a minute," Mighty said, "I know there are people waiting on you, but could you at least tell us what you're planning to do?"

"Yes," Amadeus added, "We'd like to know what's going on, Sonic."

"Robotnik's got everybody on a big barge. It's a couple of miles out to sea thataways," Sonic said, gesturing vaguely, "I took out all the robots on board and freed everybody, but I can't pilot the boat without Mighty's card. Soooo, if that's all…"

"Where are you planning to take the barge?" Amadeus asked, "Do you know how to get to the Kingdom of Acorn?"

"Acorn?" Sonic asked, "I was planning to bring it back to shore and let everybody off."

"What?" Amadeus shouted, as though Sonic had proposed to deliver them straight to Robotnik, which, Mighty realized, to Amadeus' way of thinking, was more or less exactly what he had done

"Well, yeah," Sonic continued, confused by the general's reaction, "Why would I send them all the way to Acorn?"

"That's where we sent the rest of our families to get them away from Robotnik!"

"Well yeah, but…"

"So you propose to bring the remainder back to the island so that they can what, make another stand? This is war, Sonic, and it's a war we're not equipped to win. We want to survive. The operative strategy is retreat."

"Oh," Sonic replied, "Nah, you got it all wrong. I'm not asking anybody else to fight, I'm going to find that no good egghead and stomp him myself. You should send somebody to tell all the boats to turn around."

"Are you serious?" Amadeus asked. To Mighty's surprise it was a genuine question.

"Of course I am," Sonic replied, "Did you see what I did to his base? I wrecked it. And I'll keep on wrecking his stuff until I find him, and then I'll wreck him too."

"Yeah," Mighty added, "He's got a point. It made sense to send everybody away when Robotnik sent his robots, but… I don't think it makes as much sense now that we're here."

"I know you boys think you can handle Robotnik's machines," Amadeus began,

"We can handle them! We have handled them!" Sonic interrupted angrily, "I took down an entire base by myself!"

"I saw the evidence myself," Amadeus said, "You've beaten every machine he's thrown at you so far, okay, but this is the same man who convinced us he was a benevolent scientist conducting a few harmless experiments while he planned how to enslave us all. Can you be sure that he doesn't have other machines you haven't seen yet, ones that you can't defeat so easily, or that he hasn't somehow trapped his remaining base to kill you?"

"And suppose," Amadeus continued, overriding Sonic's attempts to object, "That he launches some reserve machine army that we don't know about on our families while you're attacking him in his lair? You may be able to destroy his machines, but we can't say the same. Do you have a plan to deal with that, Sonic?"

"He may not," Mighty said, nervously "but I think I do."

"Yes?" Amadeus asked when he hesitated. Mighty resisted the urge to swallow. His idea was workable, he was fairly certain, but he still felt nervous and stupid stating it in front of all these people. He envied Sonic's relaxed self confidence and showmanship, even if it annoyed him a bit when it began leaning towards bragging and showing off.

"Uh," he began, mentally cursing himself, "Well, um, while Sonic goes to rescue your son and destroy Robotnik's final base, I'll stay with the boat. If we get everyone on the barge, most of them can stay safe below decks, and the rest of us can make sure nothing dangerous comes aboard. I'll take the small boat out, bring the barge to shore so that everyone can get on, and while I'm doing that Sonic can take the small boat. That's it."

"I like it!" Sonic said, predictably.

"It's a good plan," Amadeus added. Mighty sighed in relief. "But one more thing," Amadeus added, turning to Sonic, "Please, bring my boy back safely."

"You can count on me, sir!"

******************

"Robuttnik's really beefed up his security," Sonic commented as Matt piloted the boat back towards the island base he had escaped from mere hours ago. They had determined it would make more sense for someone else to drop him off, as Sonic by himself would have been forced to beach it, leaving both Sonic and the boat vulnerable to attack. Buzzbombers circled in the sky, and robotic drones lined the beach, waiting for him with blasters drawn, among them a few curiously stylized tank like robots that resembled nothing so much abnormally large scorpions. Their curved edges might have lent a rather cartoonish air if not for the angular red and black paint job that suggested narrowed, bloodshot eyes.

"Good luck," Matt said as he switched off the motor and turned the wheel so that the boat coasted parallel to the shore.

Sonic simply smirked and leapt over the side. He hit the water running, and as the boat glided away he curled up to minimize his target area, hydroplaning across the last few feet of water and slamming into the waiting army like a cannonball.

"Send as many bots as you want, Robuttnik," he said, bouncing off the crushed shell of a scorpion, "I'll smash 'em all. Sorry guys, but I don't have time to play with you all right now, so let's get down to business!"

The robots, constructs of mathematics that they were, had spread out in a formation designed to maximize their spread and the amount of fire they could concentrate on a single point without interfering with each other. It didn't help them any. Sonic was simply too fast, weaving among them so quickly that several of the Egg robos fired on each other in their attempts to hit him. He was in his element, spinning, twisting, and flipping like a world-class gymnast through the shifting patterns of laser fire, no motion wasted, leaving nothing but scrap metal wherever he connected. The Egg robos, for their part, simply could not hit such a small and fast moving target before Sonic could smash in their domed heads.

Half of the robots were down before Sonic even learned the purpose of the scorpion tanks, at which point one of them demonstrated its function by rather spectacularly by obliterating an Egg robo Sonic had been about to smash with an explosive charge fired from its tail gun. Sonic flipped backward, dodging the shards of metal propelled at him by the explosion, and spun forward to wreck it. He definitely did not need to see a repeat performance.

This was what he was made for, Sonic thought as he raced through the forest toward Robotnik's base, bouncing off of tree trucks. The last time he had been here it had been dark and he had had Mighty and Ray in tow, but now he could really cut loose, and going around the trees was such a waste when he could use them to fly, pushing off each in turn like some sort of vertical stepping stone before gravity could counteract his momentum and drag him to earth. He almost wished this could last a bit longer, that this wasn't Robotnik's last stand. The doctor was evil and needed to be stopped, but destroying his robots was an immensely gratifying adrenaline rush, even if they didn't put up much of a fight.

He almost faltered when the trees gave way to a large pit filled with shiny metal spikes. A new construction project of Robotnik's, undoubtedly meant for intruders going entirely too fast for their own good. Rather than attempt to slide to a stop and thereby fall into the pit, Sonic jumped, sailing unscathed over the danger. He landed feet first on an Egg robo, knocking it over and riding the hapless bot like a surfboard as it slid on its back across the ground until it slammed head first into the base of a palmtree. Its two companions barely even had a chance to fire. Sonic breathed a quick sigh as a few scorched leaves drifted to earth and took off at a slightly more sedate pace. It wouldn't do to fall into a trap here, so close to the egghead's lair.

Sonic pulled up short as he came out of the forest and saw the new fortifications Robotnik had made to his base. Every entrance was covered with protective reinforced steel caging, behind which swarmed countless bots, trenches had been dug, and in some places entire walls appeared to have been newly constructed over chinks in the infrastructure's armor. It was excellently prepared. Sonic could batter down one of the cages and go in through the doors, but it would probably absorb his first few hits, crumpling without pulling free, and would give the bots inside plenty of chances to shoot at him. He edged back into the forest, and then broke into a full sprint. As he neared the closest doorway he swerved slightly, running down the into the trench beside it, up the other side, and then continued straight up the side of the building until he reached the roof.

Robotnik obviously hadn't thought to put defenses on top of his building. Besides the ever-present buzzbombers in the sky, there were no defenders up here, and aside from the odd vents and cooling units, there was nothing obstructing his path across it. Of course, that also meant that the buzzbombers had a clear shot at him. He hadn't stood still long enough to give them one when he arrived, and running through the forest had only helped him in that regard. He took off across the top of the base, looking for a way in. It was larger than the other one by a good bit, and for good reason. That had been mainly intended as a temporary holding cell, with labs attached in case Robotnik needed to perform experiments on site. This was his main fortress, containing far more complete facilities, and housing multiple enormous indoor courses for high velocity experiments that required potentially miles of track to adequately perform. Sonic had practiced on obstacle courses in this building. As such, it was a great distance across, no matter which side one looked at it from. For Sonic, it was no great feat to run from one side to the other, but even discounting all the empty space inside, finding a single fox cub in the labyrinth was a daunting prospect.

After a couple of minutes of inspection and dodging buzzbombers, Sonic spotted his way in. A large circular section of fine grating covered a large, slow moving industrial fan providing airflow to the large indoor obstacle course below. Sonic didn't hesitate for a second before leaping into the air and coming down on the center of the fan with the crushing force of his Sonic Spin. It broke free of its moorings with a screech of twisting metal and fell to the floor below with a tremendous crash. Sonic shook his head slightly as the noise reverberated in his ears and his eyes tried to adjust from the bright morning sunlight to the indoor gloom. He heard the unmistakable click of several dozen guns being leveled at his head, and noticed the sea of red eyes surrounding him. It was a trap. Robotnik had been expecting him to come through the roof.

"Knock knock," he said, as a storm of laser fire erupted.


	8. Chapter 8

Sonic limped through Robotnik's fortress, heavily favoring his right leg as he searched for Amadeus Prower's kidnapped son, Miles. Or Tails, as most of the island kids called him, owing to the fact that he had two of them. Sonic wasn't terribly familiar with the kid; since there was a four year age difference between them they didn't hang out much, and from what he gathered the boy was extremely shy anyway.

"Hang tight little buddy, I'm comin' for ya," he said aloud, in no small part to distract himself from the pain in his leg. It had caught on a sharp piece on the underside of closing barricade as he slid through, and the metal had torn a long gash up the side of it. It wasn't bleeding too bad anymore, but it was really slowing him down, and it was only the largest of many cuts and scrapes, not to mention a dozen laser burns, at least.

A trio of Egg robos filed into the hall, marching out of one of the many, many uniform doors that lined it, which slid shut with a pressurized hiss behind them. Sonic launched into a spin attack, smashing the center one and ricocheting into its fellows. Scattered robot remains hit the ground before Sonic, but he almost collapsed on landing as searing pain lanced up his leg. He gritted his teeth and ignored it.

The problem with Robotnik's stupid base was that all the doors and hallways looked the same. Everything was constructed with unearthly uniformity. Color, shape, size, any quality one could think to ascribe to a stretch of hallway, they could find replicated many times throughout the base with such precision that there was no way to tell which was which, except perhaps the length of hallway and the number of doors. That was the case until Sonic started smashing things, anyway. Now many of the halls were missing doors entirely, labs were smashed, and the remains of robotic drones lay scattered haphazardly everywhere. He might have called it an artistic representation of the triumph of individuality over the imposed uniformity of science had he been philosophically minded. As it was, he was just tired and sore, and called it a lot of wasted time. He wished he had taken the time to memorize the floor plan better. As it was he had to have torn up at least half the rooms in the building. At least half, he told himself. He'd been to his room, Mighty's, Ray's, every room in their block, and every other section he could remember containing living space, which was admittedly only two of them. Tails could be anywhere in the fortress, but Sonic was really hoping he was somewhere in this section.

Tails huddled in his room, scared and miserable. Cell was really a better description for the eight-foot by eight-foot space, for while it contained things that one would not traditionally expect in a prison, such as the two way video conference unit, he was nonetheless incarcerated within the sterile, featureless steel walls. Robotnik hadn't done anything with him since he was brought here, which was fine by Tails, although he was rather hungry, given that his last meal had been at least twenty four hours ago by his estimate. Time positively crawled in the tiny room, although, again, he preferred monotony to facing the doctor or his robots. He slept as much as he could, curled up into a ball clutching his twin tails like a security blanket.

When he couldn't sleep anymore, he paced, tugging uneasily on the long hairs sprouting from his forehead until he was in danger of pulling them out. His fretful meandering was interrupted by the sound of metallic feet in the corridor outside. He stiffened, preparing for the door to open, but the feet tramped on past. Still within earshot, the feet stopped, and Tails heard them open fire. He hurried to the door and put his ear to it. There was a series of crashes, several loud thumping booms, as though something were impacting the walls over and over, and the horrific screech of metal on metal, grating even through the door. Through it all Tails thought he could make out shouting and an incredibly rapid patter, like someone had cranked a metronome up to the highest setting, recorded it, and played it back at triple speed, so fast that the beats almost merged into a continuous hum. Six seconds after he first heard the robots open fire, there was silence.

Tails pressed his ear harder to the door, trying to figure out what in the world was happening out there. Gongs went off inside his head as something impacted the door with incredible force, nearly shaking it out of its frame. He had the presence of mind to scramble backwards onto his bed, which got him out of the way of the door just in time, as a second impact tore it clean out of the wall and knocked it to the floor with a metallic boom. Tails peered fearfully at the figure standing in the doorframe. It was… Sonic? The blue hedgehog looked back at him, emerald eyes alive with weary triumph.

"There you are! I've been looking all over for you, bud. How're you holding up?"

"You look awful!" was all Tails could think to say, wincing in embarrassment as he realized this was probably not the best of greetings, even if it was entirely true. Livid burns stood out all over the hedgehogs' body, and he was bleeding from numerous shallow cuts, and two not so shallow ones, one along his left hip and the other down the length of his right left.

"I've been better," Sonic shrugged, just a trifle stiffly, and flashed a reassuring grin, "but I'll live. How about you?"

"I'm fine," Tails replied, feeling much better for the smile, "A little hungry, but that's all." Sonic's optimism was positively contagious.

"Well, I don't think I can do much about that, but what say I bust you outta here?"

"Yeah!" Tails replied, feeling slightly foolish as they stepped out into the hall. What did Sonic expect him to say to that? No, thanks?

"Hmm," Sonic stopped, tapping his foot and looking first one way, then the other, "What's the quickest way out of here?" he mused aloud.

"Uh," Tails said, trying to remember how he had been brought in, "That way, I think."

"Okay, good enough for me," Sonic said. He turned to face Tails, and put a hand on his shoulder. "Here's the deal. Follow me, but stay back a ways in case Egghead sends more robots at me, but don't get so far behind that we get separated either, okay?"

"Okay."

Tails followed him, stepping gingerly over the crumpled remains of a squad of Egg robos. Unease warred with curiosity in his mind as he contemplated the robots. Part of him desperately wanted to grab at least part of one and take it with him to study. Robotnik was a nasty person, but he built fascinating machinery. Tails had been very tempted to pull apart the gadgets in his room, but the thought of bringing Robotnik's drones down on his head over the vandalism had persuaded him to let them be. At the same time, he wanted to get out of here as quickly as possible. What if one of the apparently deactivated Egg robos came to life, or worse, what if fresh ones showed up? So while part of him wanted to stay and examine the machinery, another part wanted to run as far and as fast as he could. He ignored both instincts and kept a measured pace about ten feet behind Sonic.

The hedgehog was the biggest mystery of all. Tails studied him as he limped along ahead. Sonic was clearly downplaying his injuries as much as possible for Tails' benefit, but they were just as clearly hurting him quite a bit. Sonic was favoring his right leg rather heavily, and those burns had to be uncomfortable. It was not his injuries that mystified Tails, however. No, what Tails couldn't figure out was how he didn't have more. Sonic appeared to have entered the base all by himself, and not with Robotnik's consent either. Tails had been unable to witness the battle between Sonic and the Egg robo squad, but he had heard it, and the scrapped robots behind them were solid evidence that Sonic had won handily.

Furthermore, Tails noted as they progressed through the corridors, it had not been his first battle, not by a long shot. Almost every doorframe they passed was a gaping hole devoid of door, and wrecked robots lay scattered at intervals. Tails surmised that not only had Sonic destroyed these on his own, he had dealt with the ones outside Tails' door while already wounded. What had happened to him? Tails had never been close friends with Sonic, he was too young and too shy to dare to hang out with the blue hedgehog, but he had admired the way Sonic won every race and was invariably the best at any game that involved getting an object from one point to another, since nobody could catch him. Tails didn't often participate in these games, since he preferred to read in his father's library, but he always tried to be on Sonic's side when he did play, which was difficult because Sonic was chosen first when he wasn't captain, and Tails was middling or last.

Tails' thoughts were interrupted as a troop of four Egg robos marched into the hallway through one of the empty doorframes.

"Priority one hedgehog! Surrender Subject: Miles Prower!"

"No."

Tails gasped as Sonic launched his assault. One instant he was standing positioned between Tails and the Egg robo squad, and the next he was nothing but a blue blur, streaking between the Egg robos so fast that by the time the head of the first hit the floor, separated as it had been from its torso and sent flying by the kinetic energy of Sonic's strike, the others were on their way down. Sonic staggered as he landed, and fell to his knees.

"Nnngh," He grunted, as Tails rushed forward and helped him to his feet, "I'm okay, just couldn't stick the landing on this leg."

Luckily for them, they reached the doorway without meeting further robots. A shiny metallic cage protected it, welded to the outside of the frame and riveted in place as an extra precaution. Even braced as it was, Sonic ripped it free in two strikes. He was helped by the fact that it curved outward, meant to deflect impacts from the outside but concentrating those coming from inside it, but even so his momentum had to be truly incredible to move it.

"Ergh," Sonic said, picking himself up and shaking his quills, then grabbing Tails by the arm and dragging him toward the cover of the tree line as buzzbombers started to attack, "All right, here's the deal. I'm pretty sure Robotnik is somewhere in here, and I'm not letting him get away, so I'm going to take you as far as the beach. You get in the boat, and Matt will take you back to your dad and then come back for me, okay?"

"I understand," Tails said as they reached the treeline and slowed to a more sedate pace, "but are you sure you should do that? You're in pretty bad shape."

"I'll be fine," Sonic replied, grinning as though he knew something Tails didn't. "Watch this!"

Sonic had spotted a line of gleaming rings in the dappled shade of the forest, and as he scooped them up Tails watched his burns and cuts fade. They didn't outright vanish, not all of them, but he looked significantly better, as though he had spent days healing instead of seconds. Truthfully, he looked better than if he had been healing naturally. Natural healing left scars, but there was simply no trace that many of his injuries had ever even been.

"See? As long as I've got these things, I'll be fine. Come on, your dad's worried about you." Sonic trotted off through the forest without waiting for a reply, and Tails had to run to catch up with him.

The woods were eerily quiet except for the ominous buzzing of Robotnik's buzzbombers somewhere above the canopy. The area seemed entirely devoid of wildlife, although had Tails been a small animal he would have been hiding far away from the eerie metallic invaders too, so the silence wasn't terribly out of place. Even though a fair amount of light filtered through the trees what shadows there were made Tails extremely nervous. He kept eying them, expecting to see the gleam of polished steel guns emerging from behind the trees. However, Sonic had done a reasonably thorough job with Robotnik's squadrons, and they reached the edge of the beach without incident.

"Here's the plan," Sonic said, yet again, grabbing Tails by the arm and pulling him back under the cover of the tree line as he tried to leave it. Tails couldn't help feeling a bit condescended to. Given that Sonic had had plenty of time to explain it while they were walking, did Sonic not think he would be able to remember if it wasn't broken into bite sized chunks? Alternatively, he realized as Sonic paused, looking thoughtful, the blue hedgehog was making it up as he went along, and explaining things as he thought of them.

"Okay, I'm going to run out on the beach and get Matt to bring the boat in. There are still bunches of buzzbombers around, so I'll get their attention too. Then I'll lead them away and you go out to make sure Matt doesn't turn the boat around. He should be expecting me to lead them off and run back before they can turn around, but just in case. Then you tell him to come back for me after he drops you off. Got it?"

"Got it." Tails replied, although Sonic was standing on the beach before he finished the second syllable.

Sonic waved his arms vigorously toward a boat about three quarters of a mile offshore, shouting "Hey, pick me up!" He was still shouting when a squadron of buzzbombers swooped in and opened fire.

"Missed me!" he crowed, thumbing his nose at the mechanical wasps, who responded to the taunt by trying to shoot him again. Sonic danced around the sand, staying just ahead of the lasers by design, never moving more than a couple of feet from where they were aiming but always pausing just long enough to give them what looked like a clear shot.

"You rust buckets couldn't hit the broad side of a barn! Catch me if you can!" he shouted, and he was gone, leaving nothing but a spray of sand in his wake. The ominous hum of wings receded into the distance as the buzzbombers followed him.

Tails ran out onto the beach and waved his arms until he was sure the boat had spotted him and was approaching. He swam the last few yards as it approached so that Matt wouldn't have to waste time beaching it and then trying to get back into deeper water again. As he came up alongside it Matt reached out a hand. Tails grabbed it, and the rabbit helped him clambered over the side, where he flopped onto the deck before picking himself up and wringing as much water out of his fur as he could.

"Good to see you," Matt said, "I hope Sonic hurries back. I don't fancy staying so close to shore for very long."

"Good to see you too," Tails replied, "but Sonic told me not to have you wait for him."

"What? Why would he do that?"

"He's not done with Robotnik. He said you should take me to my dad and then go back for him."

"That boy is crazy," Matt said, shaking his head as they stepped into the cabin, "But I'm not going to argue with him. If that's what he wants, that's what I'll do." He spun the wheel and turned the boat around, then shifted the throttle forward. The craft accelerated comfortably and they headed away from the island. Tails walked back out onto the deck and watched it recede into the distance, glad to be getting further away with ever passing second.

A gleam in the distance caught his eye. At first he thought it was just the sun reflecting off the water, but as he looked closer his heart sped up. It was reflecting at the wrong angle to be the water, and it was getting brighter, closer. This was the gleam of burnished metal, and it was unmistakably bearing down on them. He ran back into the cabin.

"Matt, there's something following us! It looks like another boat."

"What?" he let go of the wheel momentarily and tusk his head out the window, looking behind them, "Where?"

"There!" Tails pointed at the patch of glare that marked the approaching object. It was definitely gaining on them.

"Damn!" Matt swore, "You keep an eye on it, I'm going to try to outrun it! Hold on to something!"

Tails did as he was told, bracing himself in the door as Matt cranked the throttle to full forward position. The boat jumped ahead and began to bounce on the small waves that were kicked up the light breeze. They had already been moving at the fastest clip the craft could reasonably manage in choppy water. Despite sacrificing stability for speed, the other craft was still gaining on them. Tails watched as it approached, trying to judge if they could make it to land before it drew even with them. Not a chance, he realized, it would catch them no less than a mile from shore, maybe two. He could do nothing but watch in consternation as the craft gained on them until he could make out what was on it.

It was essentially a flat metal deck about fifteen feet long and eight feet wide, the under side of which quickly tapered to a sharp and very streamlined draft. A squad of six Egg robos surrounded a nasty looking scorpion robot, all apparently held to the deck with magnetic restraints. Due to the disparate proportional size of this craft and its huge motor compared to the larger but more moderately powered boat Tails was on, it was able to move much faster but it bounced around on the waves more as well. Their boat must have been for Robotnik's personal use, Tails surmised.

"They've almost caught up!" He shouted to Matt, "Twenty yards behind! Fifteen!"

"Subject: Miles Prower: Surrender!" The Egg robos chorused in unnerving unison as they pulled alongside and the one driving cut speed to match Tails' vessel.

"Get inside!" Matt yelled.

Tails followed this very reasonable advice, slamming the door behind him and ducking to the floor as the Egg robos fired on the cabin. Luckily, the alloy Robotnik made it out of proved resistant to the attacks, and none of them penetrated to the interior, or even appeared to cause structural damage. Tails was about to stand up and cautiously make sure of that when an explosion rocked the cabin and threw him to his knees.

"What was that?!" Matted shouted, as he struggle to stay upright and keep the boat on course.

"Subject: Miles Prower and Accomplice: This is your final warning: Surrender or face termination." the Egg robos chorused. Their boat pulled sped past, then pulled in front of and abruptly cut speed, forcing Matt to pull back on the throttle and swerve to avoid crashing.

"Damn! They're herding us!" he shouted as he tried to alter his course back toward the island, only to be intercepted again, "If I-" he was cut off as the scorpion robot in the middle of the deck launched an explosive charge into the windshield. Tails threw his arms up instinctively as he was thrown back against the wall by the concussive force of the explosion, and felt heat envelop him. Pain lanced along his arms, chest and forehead as shards of the windshield ripped into them, leaving him with dozens of tiny, and a few not so tiny lacerations. When he opened his eyes we wasn't sure if the ringing in his ears was from noise of the explosion or from when the back of his head impacted the wall, maybe both. Matt, however, looked much worse for wear. He had borne the brunt of the glass, and his face, neck and chest were stained red with blood, which only partly hid his burns. He lay on his back, unmoving.

"Matt!" Tails shouted, "Matt!" There was no response. Matt was dead.

Tails scrambled over him to grab the wheel, fighting to keep the boat from capsizing as a second shot threatened to swamp it. He slammed the throttle all the way forward as the nose came clear of the Egg robos craft. The boat shot forward, glancing off the other vessel. Tails had to fight the wheel to keep it upright, but the smaller craft was rocked just as hard, and the Egg robo driving it had to get it stable before they could pursue, which bought him valuable time while they caught up. Tails wove back and forth, cutting back and surging forward as necessary to avoid their shots and attempts to cut him off as best he could, until he was maybe a third of a mile from shore.

He pulled the throttle all the way back as the Egg robos surged up beside him, causing them to overshoot dramatically, then threw it forward and threw himself out the door as they slowed down and attempted to back track into his path. So far he had been trying to avoid a collision at all costs, and they were anticipating that. As his boat accelerated Tails hopped over the side.

"Matt… I… Augh!," he sobbed incoherently as it collided with the Egg robo's craft.

Sonic made his tentative way along a corridor beneath Robotnik's base, listening to the slightly irregular metallic ring of his footfalls. He had never been to this part of the base before, having spent virtually all of his tenure on the ground floor. The upper floor was mostly devoted to observation rooms, secondary labs, and a large office where it wasn't taken up by the indoor arenas. Sonic had wrecked pretty much all of it.

Beneath the base was different though. The top floor was naturally restricted by the size of the ground floor, but the basements had no such limits. So far, Sonic had discovered a lot of empty space. Perhaps Robotnik just hadn't got around to filling them in, or maybe they were meant to be hangars of some sort. Maybe they were just intended to house his legions of robots. Sonic had found plenty of those, along with a few large pieces of machinery he didn't understand. Some were obviously scrap that was pending disassembly, others looked like they might only need some tweaking to be functional, whatever their function was. Sonic had smashed them, just to be sure.

Where the corridor he was following went, Sonic wasn't really sure, but he had a hunch he would find Robotnik at the end of it. Emergeny lighting strips in the floor provided enough illumination for him to see where he was going, but only just enough. He walked with one hand against the wall for orientation to compensate for the fact that his vision reached about as far as his outstretched arm.

He heard the scorpion tank before he saw it, and had run up one wall, along the ceiling, and down the other before the explosive charge hit the ground. The nice thing about walls, he reflected as he smashed the robot into pieces, was that they were significantly less likely to contain obstructions. He listened cautiously for signs of backup, and, hearing none, continued on his way. As near as he could figure, there didn't seem to be any pattern to where he encountered robots or how many he found in a group. Squads ranged from solitary units to outfits of ten or more, and they seemed to patrol at random, attacking whenever he entered their perimeter. Of course, he didn't exactly stay in one place long enough for them to come to him, but did Robotnik have them programmed to patrol randomly by default, or was it specifically in hopes of catching Sonic unawares?

The corridor ended in a solid steel door. Sonic was about to spindash it when it whooshed open. He stepped through it suspiciously. Doors opening on their own was usually a sign something on the other side was waiting for you, but on the other hand he was getting really sick and tired of knocking them down. They weren't that much of an obstacle, but they required energy to remove, energy that he'd rather conserve for destroying things that mattered, like robots, although he was getting tired of running into those all over the place too. His earlier infusion of rings had taken care of the lion's share of his injuries, though the cut on his leg still throbbed dully, but he'd acquired new scrapes, burns and bruises since, and he wasn't having any luck finding more rings in the bowels of Robotnik's base. The door closed behind him.

The room on the far side of the door was relatively empty and appeared to be little more than a hub leading to other underground garages. A hunk of machinery Sonic couldn't identify filled one corner, although it looked like an engine of some kind. Three doors identical to the one behind him led in each of the cardinal directions. The only other feature in the room was one of Robotnik's ubiquitous two-way video communicators, which was the major source of illumination in the room, bathing everything in harsh blue light. Sonic figured these must also be standard installation. It wasn't like there was usually anyone down here for Robotnik to talk to, with the exception of robots who he probably had more direct means of communicating with anyway. The screen flickered to life, displaying Robotnik's familiar loathsome face.

"Hello there, rodent," Robotnik sneered, and Sonic noticed that behind his dark glasses the doctor had dark rings under his eyes. For all that his teeth were bared in a nasty parody of a smile, like a man about to deliver very bad news to a person he disliked very much, Robotnik appeared to have not slept in some time. For that matter, Sonic realized, neither had he.

"What's up, Buttnik?" Sonic replied.

"Juvenile as ever. Calling names and breaking things won't get you very far in life, Sonic."

"I'm not the one calling people 'rodent', Egghead. If you want me to quit breaking your stuff, just say so. You haven't seriously hurt anybody so far, so if you promise to pack up your robots and leave these islands forever, I'll let you go. So long as I never have to see your ugly face again, I'm willing to call it even."

"Fancy yourself a comic book hero, do you? Well on the contrary, rodent, I've already hurt a great number of people. Your young fox friend and the rabbit are both fish food by now, and your precious island is burning to the ground as we speak."

"You're lying!" Sonic shouted. He had to be, because it couldn't be true.

"Perhaps, but you don't know that, and you won't live long enough to find out. Unlike you, I'm not given to letting my enemies go because I think I've won. So, hero, here's your chance to escape a death trap. I don't think the water is hot enough to scald you to death, but drowning should be sufficient."

Sonic snarled as Robotnik's face disappeared. He was distracted from exacting vengeance on the screen by the sound of rushing water. The door on his right opened to admit a flood of painfully hot water that rushed in to fill the room. Sonic was running up the walls before it reached him, but a good bit splashed upwards and hit him anyway. It was in fact scalding hot, painfully, if not fatally so. Worse than that, Sonic had nowhere to run. The room was sealed, the water was gushing in through the only open door, and he could only defy gravity for so long anyway.

He leapt onto the large engine type machine, balancing precariously above the rising flood while he took a brief instant to figure a way out of the trap. There was really only one thing to do; only one thing he could do. Sonic leapt off the machine and hurled himself at the other doors, careening between them at top speed, so that rebounding off the first propelled him across the room and into the second, from there to the third and then back to his perch, only to start all over again. Much to his frustration, these doors were considerably thicker than those separating lab from hallway on the ground floor. Three rounds later they were still standing and the water was lapping at the bottoms of his shoes as he clung to the giant engine. He launched himself at the first door again, rebounded around the room, and didn't even stop to reposition himself as he landed back on the engine, instead pushing off as soon as his feet touched it and hydroplaning across the rising water.

The door gave, and with a roar the water pushed it out of the frame and rushed it down the corridor beyond. Sonic rode the door on top of the raging flood for a split second before the immense weight of it overcame the momentum of the water beneath it and it sank. The water had barely touched his shoes before Sonic leapt off and ran along the wall, out pacing the surge a little more with every step. He really hoped he wasn't running into a dead end.


	9. Chapter 9

Tails ran through the underbrush of South Island, still damp and smelling of salt from his swim to shore. A squad of Egg robos followed him, some indeterminate distance behind. Branches slapped at his face and thorns tore at his fur as he ran, but he didn't dare turn around to see if he'd lost them. The noise of his flight eclipsed any they were making in pursuit, and the lack of laser fire meant they probably couldn't see him, but he still didn't fancy stopping to check.

It was just a bit further to the shed anyway, he thought. Although the residents of South Island preferred on the whole to live naturally, they did recognize the usefulness of certain pieces of machinery. Emergency medical equipment, flashlights, and a few other human made odds and ends were kept in town, but Tails father also maintained a shed on the far end of the island that held a few larger and less often used machines, chief among them an old biplane and a large generator. Tails found machinery fascinating, and always accompanied his father out on the routine maintenance checks he made each month. Disassembling defunct machinery and putting it back in working order was Tails' hobby, but the little biplane was his passion, and reaching it was his current objective. He only got to fly it a couple of times per year, but his father had been letting him practice since he was six, and the last time he had even flown solo. After all, it was the fastest and surest way to get to the mainland in case of an emergency, so it was important he knew how to fly it.

However, he wasn't intending to fly to the mainland just yet. Tails was planning to go back and rescue Sonic. He couldn't save Matt, but he wasn't about to repay Sonic's kindness by leaving the hedgehog trapped on Robotnik's island. Up ahead the shed came into sight. On three sides it was surrounded by encroaching shrubbery, including creeper vines climbing up the steel walls of the building itself and a few young trees growing almost right up against it. The fourth side, the one with the big garage door, opened up as always onto a short, laboriously hand paved runway. Vegetation was threatening to strangle this too, including a largish palm tree that had been knocked askew in some recent windstorm, which tilted rather rakishly over the runway itself. It was about time again for his family to do some pruning, he thought absently as he ran towards the door.

It was locked, of course. His father wasn't dumb enough to leave it open for just anybody to walk in and muck around with the machinery. At the same time, however, it was a perfunctory lock designed with the prevention of teenaged vandalism in mind, as was not particularly complex. He pulled a small pocketknife and a bent hairpin out of his glove and began to pick the lock. Tails had stopped by his house and grabbed them on the way to the shed. It would have been easier to grab the key, but he hadn't been able to find it after several minutes of searching, and he didn't have time to turn the whole house inside out, especially since his father had probably taken it with him.

"Subject: Miles Prower: Halt!" the Egg robos chorused behind him just as he managed to jimmy the lock open. Laser fire peppered the shed as he slipped inside and slammed the door.

They weren't firing actual lasers; Tails noted as he grabbed the big toolbox his father had taught him to use to tune the plane's engine. Lasers were concentrated beams of light. An observer would see the entire beam at once, stretching from the point where it emanated until it hit a solid object, and when the laser was turned off it would disappear all at once. The Egg robos' weapons fired bolts of energy that had a clear beginning and a clear end. They traveled incredibly fast, but you could see them move between the gun and whatever they were shooting at if you watched closely enough, so they were clearly moving slower than the speed of light. They certainly burned like lasers though, he thought, rubbing his shoulder where an errant shot had grazed him. It had hurt for a very brief instant before the shoulder went numb, but as sensation returned to the spot it had begun to hurt again. He didn't really have any more time to puzzle over how they worked though.

Egg robos filed through the door of the shed, red eyes scanning the gloomy interior of the building for their target. Tails didn't give them a chance to spread out and search. He pushed the heavy toolbox off of the high shelf he had hoisted it onto, and then jumped down on the intruding robots with his biggest wrench in hand. The toolbox hit the lead Egg robo in the back of the head, putting a dent in its chrome skull and knocking it to the floor. Tails' wrench strike saw dropped the one behind it. The remaining two tried to shoot him, but he ducked beneath the line of fire and struck the closest one in the knees with his wrench and then tackled the crippled bot to the floor. The Egg robo's deceptively thin limbs were well within acceptable structural perimeters for supporting their rotund bodies, but they weren't exactly designed for melee combat.

Tails looked up to find the last Egg robo leveling its gun in his face. He flinched and swung his wrench into the gun, feeling the fur on his face singe as the shot passed by an inch from his face and struck the wall behind him. Before the robot could fire a second time, he grabbed it by the wrist and smashed its gun with his wrench, and then bashed its face in, smashing both its eyes out in the process. He turned to the one whose legs he had mangled and brought his wrench down on its head, then gave the same treatment to the two he had knocked down at the start of the fight until he was sure all four were disabled.

Breathing hard and looking sorrowfully at his wrench, which was by now bent woefully out of shape, he opened the large garage door and pulled the Egg robos out of the way of the biplane. The Cyclone was a beautiful little plane, old but well maintained, a prime example of positively staggered fixed wing construction. At just over twelve feet long she was tiny by human standards, but nicely proportioned for dokan pilots. He knew that the two wing model had long since been supplanted by monowing aircraft in military aviation, but Tails loved her nonetheless. The Cyclone had a beauty to her that newer craft couldn't match. Tails had helped put a fresh coat of red paint on her the previous fall, and he had tuned the engine and changed the oil just last month. At his insistence, his father had even gotten some ultralight alloy struts from the mainland when Tails noticed the old wooden ones beginning to show signs of serious wear, and he had rebuilt part of the fuselage lighter and studier than before.

When they weren't using her, she was kept safe and dry in this weather proof shed, but Tails made a thorough inspection of everything anyway. Part of it was old habit, he made routine maintenance checks every time he visited the plain, but mostly it was because he was planning to fly her over enemy territory. He simply could not be too sure that everything was in perfect working order. Everything checked out, and he topped off the gas tank and was taxing out onto the runway when the bombs started falling.

"He's been gone a while now," Amadeus said uneasily, pacing along the deck behind Mighty, who was shading his eyes and looking out over the gleaming waters of the south sea, "What's keeping him?"

"I don't know," Mighty said, "and I don't like it, but I trust him to come through in the end,"

"That-" Amadeus began

"What is that?!" Mighty shouted, as a looming mass of… something appeared on the horizon. Clouds weren't that angular, and they certainly didn't move that fast, judging from the rate it appeared to be growing at. Shouts of panic broke out across the deck as Amadeus Prower's militia spotted the flying fortress bearing down on them.

For that's what it was, Mighty realized. As impossible as it seemed- How could a building fly?- the approaching object could not be anything else. He could hear engines roaring even at this distance as the angular craft struggled to overcome gravity. Even planed as it was to maximize updraft, the immense size and weight of the structure should have made flight impossible. It was bigger than the barge they were standing on! A shadow fell across the deck as it came between them and the sun, and the roar of its engines blotted out all other noise. Mighty resisted the urge to close his eyes in terror. Only Robotnik could be behind this monstrous craft, and surely he had no good intention towards the occupants of the barge. Should they attempt to evacuate, scatter to escape it? Would it matter? If the man could put something that big in the sky, surely he could build whatever he needed to hunt the survivors down.

The airship passed over the barge without doing anything, ignoring it as it did the rest of the insignificant earth beneath it. Mighty started to breath a sigh of relief as it moved over the island. Perhaps it was on its way somewhere else, or perhaps Robotnik planned to land it. If it was on the ground they could board it and destroy it from the inside like they would any other building.

A hundred hatches on the underside of the craft opened. Bombs poured out, fell like explosive rain. The island rippled under the concussive force. Gouts of fire flared as napalm bombs spread their incendiary payloads. Rocks cracked under the heat, trees burst, throwing flaming splinters everywhere, streams evaporated. In less than a minute the air was choked with smoke and swimming with heat haze, and rippling fingers of fire radiated out from the center of the conflagration, consuming everything in their path. A few even spread out across the water, where oil flowed across the surface of the ocean. Mighty watched as the village he had grown up in vanished, barely visible in the distance as it exploded and burnt to the ground, smothered with thick blankets of smoke.

The island was gone. Oh, the actual ground remained, but more than half the vegetation covering it was burnt to ash, and the rest would follow before long at the rate the fire was spreading. It would be uninhabitable for decades, if it ever recovered. In the distance, two specks crossed the sky where it was still blue above the smoke, one heading for the giant airship, the other in the direction of the island where Robotnik's main base was. Single person aircraft, both of them, Mighty noted through the tears filling his eyes, but who was flying them? One was probably Robotnik, headed to his airship. Did that mean Sonic was dead, or that the doctor was running away from him? Either way, he'd won. They had no home to go back to.

But who was piloting the other, and why was he headed towards Robotnik's base?

Sonic was limping again. This time it was his left leg. Trying to keep ahead of the surging water in a dark hallway, he had crashed into... well, he didn't know what it was, he hadn't stopped to look, but it had been solid enough to bruise his shin and ankle quite painfully. He slogged down another poorly lit corridor, listening to the eerie echoing splashes as he made his way through the knee-deep water that had submerged the safety lights by the floor, making everything darker and giving it an unearthly wavering look. The water had cooled from painfully hot to pleasantly warm, which was helping his ankle, but while it was no longer threatening imminent submersion, it was still rising, and he didn't have that much room above him before he ran into ceiling. He was well below ground now, he knew. The corridors had been leading down for some time, so he could only guess exactly how far. Half a mile? More?

His ears prickled to the sound of a strange humming. It had been there for a while before he noticed it, he realized, lurking in a range just beneath hearing and disguised by his sloshing progress. To anyone else it might have sounded ominous, but to Sonic it sounded like Robotnik was keeping something important at the end of the hallway. Sonic smiled a very feral smile. He knew Robotnik had at least a few important experimental machines in this base. He couldn't really tell them apart from the standard issue ones, but by dint of smashing everything he came across he had to have broken at least some of them. He kept hoping he'd find something important enough that the fat man would come to defend it himself. Perhaps this was something important enough to force Robotnik to confront him.

The hum increased in volume as he progressed, with an underscore of clanks and pressurized hisses and other mechanical noises playing an ever more audible counterpoint until the hallway ended in another door. Sonic smashed it out his way with a spindash and walked into the largest room he'd ever seen. A metal catwalk curved away into darkness on either side around a huge cage that extended up into blackness high above him, and down into the floor some ten feet below. Although the space directly above him ended in a ceiling some fifteen feet above his head, he could see the interior of the cage extended far above that. Safety lights illuminated the cylindrical room, far better than they had the corridors, but still not well enough to see the extent of it. Within the cage roared some sort of immense machine, giant pistons churning away outside of an interior metal column. It was all grooves and moving pieces, a giant mechanical tower whose working Sonic could not fathom. At its core, more felt than directly seen through cage, pistons, protective, glowed the power of Chaos, giving off an immense glare even through the incredibly thick protectively darkened reinforced glass housing it and the pigeonholed boilerplate protecting that. The noise was incredible, and the air smelled of metal and steam.

Following the catwalk around, Sonic discovered a flight of stairs leading to the base of the great machine, and a door offering access to the interior of the cage. Robotnik must have had a way to turn it off, for surely the fat scientist wouldn't go through the crushing pistons that slammed down at two second intervals on far side of the door to adjust his prize machine. Separated by little more than the door itself, Sonic could feel the floor shake beneath his feet with each impact. Already covered in an inch of water, droplets danced continuously across the floor with the vibrations.

Perhaps Robotnik could selectively disengage pistons, because not all of the seemed to be firing, but however he shut it down to allow maintenance, Sonic wasn't interested in turning it off. He was going to destroy it. He was just about to open the door and dash in when he heard a rushing, roaring sound above and beyond the deafening noise of the machine. The water around his ankles seemed to get more agitated… the water was around his ankles now. He sloshed around to the side he had entered from, and found a waterfall pouring out of the doorway and through the catwalk. Already he could feel it slowly rising, despite the size of the room it was filling. Was Robotnik using the ocean itself to flood the base in an attempt to kill him?

There was only one way left to go, and that was up. He dashed into the cage, slid under the dropping piston, and ran up the inner wall of the cage. Left, right, over, under, he sped around and around, dodging pistons, jumping over to the central machine when he needed to, pushing off it and hopping back to the outer wall. He jump-curled into one piston; bounced off it, hit another flat footed, pushed off it to land back on the wall. Steam erupted from various portals on the central tower as it vented heat. Sonic jumped over one, ducked under another, kept going, bouncing around like a gravity defying pinball, smacking into pistons whenever the opportunity presented itself.

He had three main things he needed to do. First, he had to wreck the machine. He was working on that one, bouncing off the sides of pistons wherever he could, trying to warp them, force them out of alignment, knock them into one another, whatever. At the same time he smashed into anything on the main tower that looked like it could be dented, deformed, knocked out of shape or just plain busted. Second, he had to get the Chaos Emerald in the core of the machine. He wasn't sure how he could do that one. It was pretty solidly protected, mostly by being forty feet off the ground behind shifting defenses. Sonic had smacked the glass twice, but it was only showing superficial spider webbing cracks so far. Pistons steam, moving things in general were preventing him from taking too many shots, or properly lining up the ones he did take. He just had to hit it when the opportunity presented itself. Third, he had to get out alive. Sonic kept, as much as was possible, a wary eye on the rising water below. It had reached the level of the catwalk already. He really had no idea how he was going to get out of this one. Going back through the door was obviously out, so he had to hope breaking the machine would allow him to escape through the ceiling.

The machine was beginning to show signs of serious wear. Steam was venting more and more often as out of whack pistons produced friction trying to move while angled no longer parallel to their sockets. One piston had stopped entirely, extended, pieces grinding vainly against one another as it tried to retract, sparking from a broken joint. Sonic put two more in similar condition in short order, and used them as jumping off points to attack the heart of the machine over and over. The cracks in the glass were more than superficial now, and the protective metal covering had fallen away from one side entirely. Many of the moving parts of the tower were no longer functioning, bent entirely out of shape.

Sonic was feeling pretty worn and torn himself. The stress of defying gravity for so long was catching up to him. His breathing was ragged, his ankle throbbed, threatening to give out at any time, and he was painfully scalded from where he had been forced to run through steam jets to avoid being crushed by advancing pistons.

He hit the glass again and heard a definitive crack as the impact transferred all the way through to the other side. He stuck it twice more in quick succession. On the third hit it finally gave, and inside he realized there was not one Chaos Emerald, but two, one red and one green. He spun in through the opening and yanked them out of their respective sockets. Something inside him warned him to get out of there.

He threw himself out the opening he had come in by and let himself fall into the water below as the central tower exploded. The heat wave at his back propelled him under the water, but he pushed off the wall and came back to the surface, gasping for breath. The problem with diving into the water to escape the explosion was that several large and very heavy pieces of metal were breaking free from one another above his head, and were about to fall on him. One large piece, several feet across and several tons in weight hit the water with a thunderous splash right beside him. Sonic rode the wave from its impact, allowing it to fling him into the air. He hit the wall feet first, pushed off, ran up another giant shard of machinery as it fell, pushed off it, bounced off two more on their way down and hit the wall running. He ran in an upward spiral as hunks of machinery fell all around him, running up the falling metal itself when he could not go around it.

He pushed straight up off of one piece, and found himself headed for one falling directly above it. He curled up, hitting the piece with his full momentum since he could not avoid it. The impact caused the relatively small sheet of metal to spin, and when it was perpendicular to the ground he pushed off it and continued his wall run. He was clear of the machinery now, but he was about to run out of wall, and the only thing below him was destroyed machinery and rapidly rising water. His only option was to punch through the roof, but his ability to crash through walls wasn't great even when he wasn't fighting gravity just to reach them.

He pushed off the wall at the last second and curled up, aiming to hit the center of the roof with as much force as he could muster. Time seemed to slow, and he could feel the energy of the three emeralds he carried expand to surround him, forming itself into something more akin to a buzz saw than a cannonball. He hit the roof spinning and tore right through both it and the earth above it with enough force to send him ten feet into air.

"Woohoo!" He shouted to no one in particular, since there was nobody around to hear his triumph, "That was awesome!" A convenient circle of rings surrounded the hole he had made. He scooped them up gratefully, feeling his injuries and weariness fade away as he did so. A pair of rocky outcroppings protruding side by side from the earth to the north caught his eye. He ran up one, rolled down it, and used the other as a ramp to launch himself into the air, partly in celebration, partly as a means to get a birds eye view of the island to determine his location. He stuck the landing flawlessly and set off towards the far shore.

What met his eyes there was not a happy sight. Even ten miles or more removed from South Island proper, he could make out the huge cloud of smoke spiraling lazily upward from the horrific fire burning there. Matt and the boat were nowhere in sight. To the west he could make out the vague outline of some monstrous flying thing moving away from the island. At this distance it might have been a cloud, but a sick feeling in his stomach told Sonic it was too solid for that. He fell to his knees and punched the sand. Robotnik hadn't been lying after all. Everyone was dead. He stayed in that position, contemplating what to do next, what he could do next; do to Robotnik to make him pay for this atrocity until he heard the sound of an approaching motor.

He looked up, preparing to fight. If he was very lucky, it might be Robotnik come to gloat. Even if it were just more of his robots, they would bear Sonic's rage in place of their master for the time being. A little biplane skimmed low over the water, headed directly for him. It was… the Cyclone? And Tails was flying it?

"Tails!" he shouted, as the cub taxied to a remarkably smooth landing on the sandy beach, "What's going on, where's Matt and the boat?"

"Matt's dead, and I sank the boat taking out the robots that killed him. Robotnik bombed island with his enormous airship, which is headed for the western chain of the archipelago right now."

"What about everybody on the barge?" Sonic asked, hardly hoping to hope. He had assumed Robotnik was entirely truthful in his claims, but if Tails was still alive…

"I'm not sure, but it didn't look like Robotnik was bombing it. He just hit the island, I think."

"You didn't check?"

"I flew by it and it looked okay, but I didn't get close enough to see the people on it. don't know that I could land the plane on it, and I decided I should come get you first. I didn't want to leave you trapped on this island," Tails said, sounding slightly embarrassed, "Did I do the wrong thing?"

"Nah, you did okay," Sonic said, hopping aboard the biplane, "Change of plans. We're not going back to the barge at all. We're following that flying fortress. I have some business to finish with Robotnik."

"We can't leave them!" Rosemary Prower shouted at her husband, who stood at the rail of the barge, seeming barely able to support his own weight even with the aid.

"We don't have a choice!" He responded, "Robotnik could come back at any time! We're lucky enough he didn't wipe us out already, I don't want to stand around giving him the chance to change his mind. We don't even know if Sonic survived. How can we commit everyone on this boat to looking for three people who might already be dead and are almost certainly beyond our reach even if they live?"

"He's our son!" she pointed an accusing finger at him, and Amadeus almost visibly withered under it. Mighty watched uneasily. He couldn't in good conscience support either of them against the other. Amadeus was right, it wasn't a good idea to stay where they were, but Rosemary was right too, they couldn't just abandon friends and family to Robotnik. Sonic had saved everyone on the boat, were they just going to leave him behind?

"I know," Amadeus replied, his voice shaking, "I will be asking myself for the rest of my life what kind of man I am, leaving my son and a hero like Sonic alone while I run away, but right now it's the best thing we can do for everyone else. The needs of the many, Rose," he held out a faltering hand, "Don't you see?" his voice broke.

Rosemary said nothing, just embraced him, sobbing. Tears glistened in the corner of Amadeus' eyes, but he fought them back. There would be time for grief later, but it would be poor respect to the people they were sacrificing not to wait until their sacrifices had been made good on to break down. Still, Mighty saw the hollowness in his eyes. He understood that hollowness, sort of. He felt a very similar one in his own core.

The Cyclone sped over crystal waters that reflected the bright afternoon sun. Wispy clouds floated high above them, but Sonic was in no mood to pay attention to the scenery. He stood on the wing, shading his eyes with one hand, looking for signs of the airbase, which had disappeared into the distance before they could approach it, or any other sign that would indicate where they could find Robotnik.

There! Ahead a speck of land appeared, growing steadily larger as the Cyclone approached. Several more appeared to either side, popping up out of the distance and expanding with it. Sonic was certain he could see the gleam of metallic factories on several of them. Good, there was a reckoning to be had. Robotnik had burned down his home; Sonic would tear down everything he ever built in repayment.


	10. Chapter 10

Hey all, sorry for the delay on this one, and welcome to the Sonic 2 adaption. This chapter was a real bear to write for some reason, probably because it's the first real interaction between Sonic and Tails. I mean normally people write on the assumption that they've known each other for a while, right? I kinda had to make it up as I went along. I think it turned out okay, but I'd welcome feedback on anything that feels forced. Enjoy!

It's good to be back.

The islands of the western archipelago sparkled invitingly as the Cyclone approached, but some of those verdant gems were covered with horrific mechanical blemishes, and it was these that flawed emeralds that Sonic intended to visit, not their pristine sisters. Three massive complexes in particular caught his eye, the largest of which appeared to be a giant metal hemisphere covering nearly an entire island. Sonic concentrated on this, it looked like the best spot for him to jump out and begin his assault. He was about to tell Tails to fly over it when he noticed that the nose of the plane was below the horizon and that the islands were coming up to meet them.

"Tails!" he shouted, over the roaring of the engine, "What's the matter? Why are we falling?"

"What?" Tails shouted back, "Hold on, I'm bringing us in for a landing!" Or that's what Sonic thought he said, only that didn't make any sense.

"What?" he responded, "Why?"

But Tails was too busy coasting the Cyclone down to a flat, grassy strip of land. They landed with a jarring thump, and rattled along the ground as Tails fought to keep the plane under control. It wasn't a perfect landing, but it was pretty good under the circumstances, or at least it seemed so until there was another teeth rattling thump and a clang and the cyclone veered to the right, nearly tipping the right wing into the dirt as it rolled toward the forest. Tails hit the brakes and wrestled the plane back onto the level, skidding to a halt just feet from a large stand of palm trees.

"Whoops," Tails said, climbing out of the plane to inspect the landing gear, "Looks like I hit a rock."

"I don't get it," Sonic said, vaulting down beside him, "why did you land here in the first place? This is like the furthest island from Buttnik's base."

"Yeah…?" Tails said, with an inflection that put the word somewhere between a question and a statement.

"How come you didn't fly closer? I could have jumped off right over the front door."

"I don't know what kind of defenses Robotnik has," Tails said simply.

"How does landing out here help that?" Sonic replied impatiently, "I'm still going in there."

"I didn't want the plane getting shot down."

"Oh yeah," Sonic said, "I was planning to jump anyway, but it wouldn't be good if you crashed."

"I'm not worried about us getting shot so much, but the Cyclone is our ride home."

"Yeah… although we could probably steal a boat or something… wait, what do you mean you're not worried about 'us' getting shot?"

"I'm coming with you into the base." Tails proclaimed defiantly.

"No you're not." Sonic said flatly, "Nuh-uh. No way, no how."

"It was my home that Robotnik burned as much as it was yours!" Tails said angrily.

"But you don't have super speed like me," Sonic countered, "I'll give him a punch for you, okay?"

"No. Robotnik burned my home down and took my family away from me. I'm coming with you!"

"You can't see them again if you get shot! I promised your dad I'd bring you home in one piece!"

"Then you'd better let me come with you so you can protect me, because I'll go after him on my own if you don't," Tails said slyly.

Ah, jeez. Sheesh, the kid was implacable. "Tails, look, I can't fight my best if I'm worrying about you the whole time. I can't watch my back and yours at the same time. Please, you have to understand, I know you want to get him back, but I don't want you getting hurt."

The fox cub started to tear up in frustration. Great, that was exactly what he needed. "Come on, buddy, it's not like that… just-"

"Let me come with you at least a little ways. If it gets too dangerous I'll hide. I promise. But I can help you, I'm good with machines and stuff, I can help sabotage his stuff. Please?"

"Ah…fine. Yeah, sure, okay," Sonic sighed, "But you have to promise to go hide if things get too rough. And I'll decide when that is, got it? When I say get you get. Deal?

"Deal!" Tails said proudly. He hopped into the plane and started fishing under the pilot's seat.

"What're you doing?" Sonic asked curiously.

"Just getting some tools," Tails said, strapping on a mechanic's belt, "and a weapon." He held up a small pry bar.

"All right then, you ready to go?" Sonic asked, wondering how much good the foot long metal bar would be against a squad of egg robos.

"We should hide the plane first."

"Oh yeah. Don't want buttnik finding it and blowing it up."

Unfortunately, there wasn't really a surplus of hiding spots available. Sonic helped Tails turn the plane around and wheel it back into the trees up to the wings. They covered the front with palm fronds, as best they could, but the result was dismal. It might escape notice from casual aerial perusal, but anyone on the ground could hardly miss it once they got close. Sonic looked at the feeble attempt and shrugged. There wasn't really anything for it. They just had to go, take out any robots they found nearby and hope none were left to check their trail. It wouldn't matter if they hit Robotnik fast enough anyway.

"Right," he said, "Let's go."

Sonic took off down the field they had landed on at what he figured would be a decent pace for the kid, slow enough that he wouldn't get left behind, but fast enough that he'd be forced to follow rather than running out ahead. Sonic looked to his left, and was surprised to see Tails keeping pace. He sped up. No change. Sonic doubled his speed. Tails was still right beside him. He continued to up his speed incrementally, and Tails continued to pace him. Perplexed, Sonic accelerated until he was going far faster than he had ever seen anyone else run, although still well below his own top speed, and Tails was still keeping up. They had left the field long and were now running along a pristine beach, parallel to the shore, heading towards the peninsula that pointed towards Robotnik's nearest base.

Finally the fox cub started to fall behind. Sonic was just about to slow down to let him catch up again, when Tails shot past him. Sonic stared dumfounded at the cubs' back. His twin tails were whirling behind him like propellers. And he was rapidly leaving Sonic behind. Sonic sped up and closed the gap between them. He still wasn't anywhere near his top speed, but still, this was unsettling. Had Robotnik's experiments given everyone super powers? Ray didn't seem to have changed much, but then, he had been the most 'normal' of them to begin with and it was always possible he had some power they had yet to see. It wasn't just Tails' speed that was disconcerting though; it was the means by which he achieved it. Sonic took exactly three seconds to go cross-eyed trying to figure out how he kept his tails from getting tangled, and thereafter gave it up as an unsolvable mystery.

"Hey," he said, when he managed to uncross his eyes, "How fast can you go?"

"I don't know," Tails said, "I was just trying to keep up with you. I have no idea how I'm doing this."

"Well that makes two of us. One way to find out then, try to keep up!"

Sonic accelerated, and Tails did likewise, until they were racing down the beach at speeds normally reserved for extreme gear. Sonic started to pull ahead, and then, in a burst of mischievousness, he revved up into high gear and left Tails behind in a spray of sand. Tails was fast, but Sonic was the fastest thing alive. He didn't hear Tails' cry of "hey, wait!". Not even sound was as fast as Sonic the hedgehog. After half a minute had passed he doubled back for Tails, and resolved to stick to a pace the other could follow.

"Sorry," he said, "Got a little carried away."

"It's all right," Tails responded, gasping a little from the effort of trying to catch up, "You're so fast!"

"You ain't too slow yourself. Now let's go kick some Robo-butt."

For the next minute and a half they just ran. There were no robots this far from the base, and Sonic took the time to admire the scenery and contemplate what they were about to do. The island was beautiful. White sandy beaches, surrounded by sparkling blue water and emerald foliage so verdant it nearly shimmered. It was, in fact, much like the island Sonic had grown up on, although smaller and uninhabited. And Sonic's home was now smoldering cinders. His jaw clenched at the memory. He would not let this island or any other like it meet the same fate. He would stop Robotnik's corruption at the source. What did that mean though? Was he willing to kill? Robotnik certainly was, but… no, there would be no killing. That would make him no better than Robotnik. He would bring the man to justice but it would be… whose? Amadeus? Sir Prower was the closest thing to real authority he knew. He would bring Robotnik to Amadeus. Let him sort it out.

Then they ran out of beach. Sonic stopped at the edge of the surf and put up a hand to shade his eyes, surveying the water and trying to decide if he could make it to the next island. He thought he could.

"Hmm," Tails said, staring out over the water.

"What?" Sonic asked.

"Well, we need to figure out how we're going to cross."

"Wait, you don't have a plan? I get that you didn't want to get shot down, but it doesn't do any good to land so far away we can't get to Robotnik."

"I, uh, I didn't think that far ahead," Tails said sheepishly, "Sorry. I thought there would be patrol boats or something we could hijack."

"No worries," Sonic said, grinning, "I'm pretty much winging it myself. And look, there are your boats right there!" He pointed. Indeed, there were several metal skiffs motoring back and forth across the water a mile or two away, along with several larger boats that seemed to be anchored.

"Those are awfully far away," Tails said, frowning, "How will we get their attention?"

"I've got an idea," Sonic smirked, "grab my arm and hold on tight!"

As soon as he was sure he had a good grip on Tails' arm, Sonic took off across the water at top speed, the fox waving behind him like some sort of furry flag. Pulling Tails behind him produced a lot of awkward drag on Sonic, and he found himself weaving to and fro as he tried to find an angle that would allow him to compensate. It would almost be easier with two people, he thought, since he'd have resistance on both sides, instead of being constantly pulled in one direction. Sonic was starting to worry he might not have enough momentum to get to the boats, but he put it out of his mind and concentrated on moving his feet.

They were on the first skiff before the Egg robos had time to register more than a pair of unidentified objects approaching at speeds normally reserved for ballistic projectiles. Sonic swung Tails up over the side and jumped on himself, slamming into a hapless Egg robo in lieu of trying to stop in what some might call the normal fashion. Egg domed robots were the best emergency brakes, he thought as the robot plummeted into the ocean. Tails had already smashed one into nonfunctioning scrap with the pry bar by the time Sonic downed his second.

"Unidentified-!" came the robotic chorus

"Oh shut up." Sonic said, homing attacking a third before they could finish. Tails shoved another off the boat as Sonic was polishing off the fourth, and the deck was clear. They stopped momentarily to catch their breath.

"That… was so cool!" Tails said, and Sonic grinned.

"Yeah, yeah it is." He didn't think he would ever get tired of the exhilaration of running faster than sound.

Tails looked around at the other boats. "I wonder what they're doing."

"I don't really care," Sonic replied. He didn't. Whatever it was, it couldn't be good.

"Looks like they're building a bridge," Tails said, pointing to a large metal road that extended from the open front doors of the large building on the nearest island until it ended abruptly over the water. The nearby ships did seem to be doing something to the effect of sinking support columns.

"Looks like a great big welcome mat to me. C'mon."

Sonic grabbed Tails, and they hopped their way across two more boats, cleaning each of its Egg robo crew, and then onto the bridge. They thundered down the metal highway at top speed. Sonic took the lead, plowing through Egg robos like a sentient, self-guiding cannonball. Not one had time to process the attack and react before the assault reduced them to scrap metal.

Then they were through the doors and in some sort of atrium. It was utterly bare, little more than a stainless steel box except for a door in the far in the far wall and one of Robotnik's ubiquitous terminals. Sonic was preparing to kick down the door when the terminal activated. It was not, however, Robotnik. Instead, a map appeared on the screen and a polite female voice informed him:

"Visitors to Kintobor Incorporated's Chemical Plant number 137 must be sterilized before entry."

"Sterilized?" Sonic asked suspiciously.

"It means cleaned," Tails added helpfully.

"Oh. Yeah, I knew that's what it meant," Sonic replied, "Anyway, thanks but no thanks, we're heading straight in."

"Guest activation passcode required." The voice said.

"I got mine right here." Sonic said, and spindashed full force into the door. It gave under the first hit, buckled under the second, and blew inward on the third.

"Warning! Warning! Portal breach in the main entrance! Facility exposed to outside contaminants! Warn-!"

Tails smashed the computer with his pry bar.

The interior of the facility was an impressive sight. It was a single enormous open room, and Sonic realized that for all the building extended some fifteen or twenty feet above ground from the outside, it was a structure that was primarily below ground. A series of cranes with odd, spider-like grippers dominated the center of the room. The ground floor door opened onto a series of metal catwalks that ran above the concrete floor some thirty feet below. Tubes ran everywhere, moving liquid to and from rows of vats that extended from wall to wall. Most of the vats, the ones Sonic could see into from his elevated vantage point on the catwalk, anyway, seemed to be full of chemicals of unknown origin and purpose. He very much doubted it was his imagination making them bubble menacingly, though. Those colors weren't found in nature. Robots bustled to and fro on the floor below them, moving containers and instruments of varying shapes, sizes, and applications from vat to vat.

He didn't have time to speculate on them, though. A squad of Egg Robos was hurrying along the catwalk toward them, and they seemed to have finally moved him from Category: Unidentified to Category: Threat. Sonic didn't wait for them to get any closer or raise their weapons any higher. He crossed the intervening space in the blink of an eye and planted a foot firmly in the face of the foremost. Its domed head exploded in a gratifying shower of sparks as Sonic back flipped into the air to come down on top of the next one. Tails burst past him and smashed into another Egg robo with enough force to knock it off the catwalk. Unfortunately, carried away by his own attack, and aided in no small part by an Egg robo that ran into him from behind, Tails went over the railing after the bot.

"Tails!" Sonic shouted as the cub fell towards one of the burbling vats. He dispatched the final two robots by kicking one into the other, sending them both plummeting to the vats below, and dove after Tails in the same motion.

It was a stupid move, on reflection. He couldn't swim, and the liquid was probably fatally poisonous anyway, so it wasn't like he was going to be any help. Luckily, something incredible happened. Tails was flying, his twin tails whirling above his head like furry propellers, and as Sonic plunged toward the vats Tails caught him by the arm.

"Wow," Sonic said, as they landed back on the catwalk, "Just…wow. That was awesome."

"Yeah!" Tails said, flattered and ecstatic. He took off into the air again, like a dokan helicopter, performing an awkward but enthusiastic aerial ballet.

"Now then, where were we?" Sonic said when he landed, "Right, time to wreck Buttnik's base." He cracked his knuckles.

He eschewed the elevator and simply jumped the thirty feet from catwalk to floor, landing between vats, and proceeded about methodically smashing every single robot in the plant. Tails followed his lead, flying down to the lower level and smashing bots. Sonic considered breaking the vats too, but he really didn't want to deal with potentially dangerous chemicals spilling on the floor, or on him. Sonic was running up one of the walls on his way to deal with another squad of Egg robos that had burst onto the catwalk when he heard a familiar voice. He back flipped from the wall to the catwalk, brought down two robos with a spinning axe kick, and two more with homing attacks, and followed the voice to a control room on the upper floor.

"What is going on in there!?" Robotnik snarled, "Status report, now!"

"Yo," Sonic said, sliding into the room, "Doctor Lardo!"

"What the?" The Robotnik face on the view screen did a double take, and turned an apoplectic shade of purple. "Sonic!" he spat, literally, "How did you get here?!"

"Why do you even have these screen thingys if you aren't expecting company?" Sonic asked smugly.

"You little cretin, I-"

"Sorry Doc, gotta run." Sonic said, speeding back out of the room. He didn't want to leave Tails unsupervised, even to taunt Robotnik. The fat man's parting words made him grin, though.

"All units, converge on Chemical Plant 137 and eliminate the hedgehog Sonic!"

He found Tails hard at work violently dismantling a worker bot. "There's company coming, bro," Sonic said, casually. He thought about telling the kid it was time to leave, but Tails had proved quite capable of handling himself so far, and Sonic dismissed the notion. Things were just getting exciting.

"What do you mean?"

"I just talked with Robotnik. He's sending every unit in the area here after us. So, y'know, we should be on our toes."

He grinned. "Get up on the catwalks. We're gonna break these tubes and flood the lower floor." Sonic grabbed a hunk of scrap from the destroyed robot and went into a spin. When he had enough speed built up he stopped abruptly and flung the lump of metal, which shot through the air like a bullet and smashed through the side of a tube. Purple liquid poured out onto the floor. Sonic repeated the process with several more tubes, until the liquid was in danger of reaching him, then ran up the wall to join Tails on the catwalk, just in time to intercept three squads of Egg robos.

Tails turned to him as he kicked the last one off the catwalk and said, "There were way more than that on the boats we passed on the way in."

"These were probably just the closest," Sonic replied.

"No, I know that," Tails responded, "what I mean is, these things don't seemed programmed with very good tactics. These ones just rushed in shooting, when they could have waited for backup. It would be a lot harder to deal with thirty or forty at once instead of less than half that."

"Lucky for us, huh?" Sonic shrugged.

"Maybe. Unless Robotnik wises up and organizes a collective strike. More to the point, I have an idea."

"Yeah?"

"We should surrender."

"What?!"

"Not for real," Tails said hastily, "But if we make it look like we exhausted ourselves fighting and surrender, they might take us to Robotnik."

"Oh, I get it now. Good plan. Just in time, too. We have company!"

Half an hour later the liquid in the tubes had finally stopped after flooding the building to about ten feet below the walks, and Sonic and Tails had repulsed two waves of Egg Robos. There were far more outside, they knew, but they seemed to be mustering at the doors, preparing for some signal. Sonic and Tails had retreated behind the shelter of a large crane in the middle of the facility. The bots opened fire whenever either of them poked a head out, but weren't nearly fast enough to get a bead on Tails, let alone Sonic.

"Heh, I feel like we're in a movie shootout," Sonic laughed, as another burst of laser fire failed to find its mark.

"Yeah, I wonder what they're-"

Tails sentence was cut off as an ominous boom shook the building.

"What the?" Sonic shouted as the ceiling rumbled, "Is he planning on blowing up the building?"

"I think now might be a good time to surrender," Tails said.

"Yeah, hold on."

Sonic vaulted out from behind the crane, racing past the Egg robos before they had a chance to shoot him, and into the control room.

"Hey doc," Sonic shouted at the screen, "Doc!" Crap. How was he supposed to surrender if the man wasn't at his computer?

The screen turned on, filling with Robotnik's mustachioed face.

"What do you want, rodent?"

"My, er, associate and I have decided that we're ready to surrender."

"Delightful. Unfortunately for you, I am no longer interested in your capture. You've served your purpose, Sonic, now you're just a pest to be exterminated."

The screen turned off. Shoot, and it had been a good plan too. Ah well, Sonic wasn't opposed to doing things the hard way.

"No dice, Tails." He said, diving back behind the crane, "He isn't interested."

"That's a problem," Tails said nervously as the ceiling shook again.

"Not really, just inconvenient."

"No, I mean, I realized something. I'm pretty sure these chemicals are flam-"

Tails was cut off as the roof above them exploded inward. Sonic grabbed tails and threw himself across the room in a diving roll as a major hunk of metal that had once been part of the ceiling smashed the crane they had been hiding behind, and buzzbombers came pouring through the roof, spewing fire from tail mounted flamethrowers.

"What were you saying?" Sonic asked as he pulled Tails toward the exit, weaving back and forth to keep the Egg robos there from getting a bead on them.

"The chemicals are flammable!"

"Yeah, that's what I thought."


End file.
